Dave and I just got back from a trip to the 'low country' - Savannah and Charleston. A trip in celebration of the 10 years of marriage that we will, Lord willing, mark this May. We opted to get out while temps were still manageable in the south and before roofing season really picks up. (So is the life of a roofing contractor :) ) It also worked out nicely that the kids could spend Spring Break in Arkansas with my folks.
We took thorough tours of each of these cities, spent some time at Middleton Plantation, and also visited Fort Sumter - where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. In fact we took in a lot of Civil War history. You can't visit the low country and not hear about, see about it and almost nearly taste it. The Civil War in the south is not so quickly forgotten as it seems to be by us Yankees, up north. And there is no doubt - the Civil War was fought over slavery - and therefore freedom.
Now, having grown up and having been educated in the north, I have long read the history books that seem to imply that the north was full of moral and ethical, level headed cherubs led by the brave Ulysses S. Grant. While the south, led by the rebellious and pompous Robert E. Lee, was full of hateful, prejudiced, money hungry bullies. They treated the African slaves like work horses and considered them property. While this may be true (and probably is) I got a very different picture of this while in the south.
As I now understand it, Abraham Lincoln, newly elected president at the time, was foremostly concerned with maintaining the Union. If he could have done this and kept slavery as a means of southern manufacturing, he may have. (See his comments in the Lincoln - Douglas debates.) In fact originally the debate was over the fact that he was of the opinion that any new state added to the Union should be a free state. The south saw this as a threat; the first step towards taking their workforce away. Taking away their power in government and their participation in the formation of the growing country. The ways of the north would take over and their identity and freedoms lost. It sounded a bit too much like what they had just fought to regain from Britian.
You see, slavery had been prevalent since the establishment of our country. When the settlers arrived they virtually created a working class out of the Native Americans that were here. A race specific group that they used to produce the things that they needed to settle the unfamiliar land. Eventually they expanded and imported another race - Africans - to help them. In the south the Africans that were familiar with rice crops were especially handy. In the north, African labor forces helped settle the untamed land. However, the crops in the north, and the industry therefore, didn't require the manual labor like the southern plantations, and so the need for such a labor force diminished. The north was surviving just fine without the slave labor of Africans, and so people began to believe the south should follow suit. What the northerners didn't consider was the fact that their money was driving much of the demand for slavery. You see, they wanted their southern goods of rice, tea, cotton and tobacco at the same cost and quality as they had come to expect - yet they wanted the production of such products to change almost completely. Southern plantation owners were left with a big dilemma - they couldn't maintain their standard of living - their profits - if they didn't have slaves.
I'll stop my history lesson here and move on to the great revelation that I had, or was reminded of. Things have not changed. Although the trans - Atlantic slave trade was abolished in this country in 1808, the same dilemma faces us over 200 years later. A cost is incurred at some point. We want our stuff cheap - and so we feed the engine that takes the freedom of 27 million people to make it that way. You see, the women in the textile mill that makes our $7 t-shirt cannot be paid well. The factory owner cannot maintain good working conditions because we want our t-shirt to be cheap and he wants his profit. We want an $.88 chocolate bar, so the cocoa that made the chocolate can't come from a farm where goods are fairly traded and workers are fairly compensated. For that to happen you would have to be willing to spend $4 on your chocolate bar and $20 on your t-shirt. That would cramp our American standard - of - living style! You see, even though we may stand, like the northern abolitionists, and say "No More Slavery", we are unwilling to sacrifice the cheap convenience that slavery allows us. A steep price is paid one way or the other. Instead of tightening our belts and reigning in our spending, we have chosen to tighten the chains of injustice around the lives of the poor and powerless. We really have.
It says somewhere that money is the root of all evil. Or the love of it...or the fear of not having it...
The evil of human trafficking, and child-labor, and forced labor, and all the other injustices around our country and our world are rooted very deeply in...and if not rooted, they are well fed and watered by, money - your money.
I suspect many might say, "Well, I'm sorry, but I can't afford to pay the higher prices..." and I am there with you. I still buy candy occasionally in the check out line - but I do it knowing that I feed the machine. I have changed some of the more simple things, like spending a little more to buy free and ethically traded coffee - and drinking it a little less so our budget doesn't feel it quite so much. Like buying gifts at our local fair trade store (there is one near you, and prices are not more than you would spend elsewhere.) I also use websites and apps like
free2work to see what brands and companies are working to purify their supply chains and try to buy from them and not from those whose bottom dollar means supply chains they'd rather keep quiet. I also took this
assessment that helped me better understand my "slavery footprint". (My spending and lifestyle could result in me having the equivalent of 53 slaves working for me.) I also partner with organizations like
IJM and
Not For Sale to keep up to date on developments in government legislation and other abolitionist movements. Would you choose your first step and join me?
I do believe that slavery, in all it's forms - industrial, sexual, labor - is wrong. And I suspect that most people would stand with me in that. I am also convinced that it isn't enough to believe that slavery is wrong, to say that I want the injustice to stop, and not change my life to reflect that belief.
PS - Let's not get nit picky with my history here...you get the point - whether my dates are spot on or not. :)
In general I am not a fearful person. I don't tend to be a worrier. I tend to have the attitude that worrying can't really change anything or ensure that bad things won't happen. I also have a pretty strong inclination to respond to tough situations with "Well, can't do anything about what has happened so how do we move on from here?!" However sometimes, those times I've heard people's stories of their lives changing in an instant - an accident, an illness, a disaster - come to mind and I do find myself thinking about "What if..."
