Of human bondage

While we tend to think of slavery as an evil eliminated by the Civil War, some recent newspaper stories remind us that around the world -- and even here in America -- people are still kept in bondage and treated like property.

According to an Associated Press article from earlier this week, there are an estimated 10,000 "forced laborers" in the US, many of them children purchased to do domestic work. That number is, sadly, just a tiny fraction of what goes on elsewhere in the world. Anti-Slavery International, which traces its roots back to 1787, estimates that there are at least 12 million people, half of them children, enslaved, and that the practice is going on in virtually every country.

In yesterday's New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about young girls used as sex slaves in Southeast Asia, an undertaking that is profitable because of the large number of men from the West who travel to those countries to pay for them. The girls are tortured in below-ground chambers if they don't smile, appear eager and get customers. There have also been recent stories about forcibly-held domestic servants in Saudi Arabia and child slaves in China.

We are sometimes tempted to ask, "Why should I care about this?" Of course, to think about all of the world's problems and about every human being who is suffering can be depressing and overwhelming, but as we begin a new year let us remember the words of the English poet John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.