Sex, drugs, slavery: We shoulder responsibility, but others started vile traditions

American practices of slavery continued beyond what could be seen as an historical commonplace (as onerous as that may be). It took a Civil War to outlaw slavery here — a war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our best men and women. And certainly our practices of institutionalized racial inequality were then permitted to continue well into what was called an age of enlightenment (we stood on the moon before we outlawed racial discrimination).

However, the truth is that the United States did not create slavery here or anywhere. There were no U.S. citizens who started that business, although there were Americans who carried it forward 150 years ago.

Never mind that slavery was an age-old African continental practice that the early explorers (and exploiters) from Europe took up with alacrity. Never mind that the coastal tribes had always raided the inland tribes for slave labor and were thrilled to have European expertise to make the job easier. Never mind that some African nations still practiced legal slavery into the 1970s (Tunisia for one). Never mind that the Arabian tribes had been capturing slaves along the east coast of Africa for millennia. Never mind that these very nations continued slavery into the 1860s.

If anybody should be apologizing it should be the remnants of the Dutch East India Co. and the English East India Co. The Germans simply kept slaves in Africa and used up their lives in construction projects and mines in Tanganyika and Zambia. Let’s not forget the Spanish and Portuguese who captured and used more slaves than any others in the conquests of the Caribbean, South and Central America.

Is slavery over? Not on your life. Slavers have turned to the voiceless, the weak, and the poorest. Slavery has become the number one purveyor of sex-slaves, taking hostage or kidnapping the very young for revolting intent. Similarly, slave practices manipulate the very poor into transporting drugs or becoming illegal sweatshop workers in this country and in far-off ghettos.

While it may be useless to ask the drug users on the streets of New York and Los Angeles to apologize for the cocaine fields of Columbia, the poppy fields in Afghanistan or the drug smugglers of Mexico, the real enemies here are the criminals distributing the stuff on our streets for they finance the slave trade.

Do the drug users, especially the “social users,” carry some measure of blame? Sure, but the growing of drug plants (cocaine or heroin), the terrorizing of indigenous peoples for criminal intent, the killings, and the pollution of our youth is a deliberate evil perpetrated on an innocent population who, once chemically hooked, may be considered culpable but are, in fact, trapped in their addiction.

However, that is not the case with sex slavery. Sex with enslaved minors may be seen as a sickness, but it is not chemically addictive and therefore the end-perpetrator is little more than a slave master with all the immorality that entails.

Sweatshop slavery through financial coercion or illegal immigrant status is a matter of greed and power, both of which should be stripped from the perpetrators at the earliest possible moment. However, care should be taken not to punish the slave in the process.

Slavery may well be generational, almost primordial, as a crude means for one person to have control and power over another. Certainly it came from a pre-civilized past of all mankind. Some of those practices took far too long to fade out or be eradicated.

Mamouka, a Tunisian slave, was rescued in 1972 by friends of ours living in Spain. They bought her for $50 in Tunis and smuggled her back to their house in Estepona (south of Spain). It took them 6 years to get her a passport. When last we heard, Mamouka still couldn’t grasp the idea of self-determination or freedom. Her “owner” Tera Davy persisted in her education in freedom, perhaps does still, all the while ensuring Mamouka never feels abandoned.

Stamping out slavery has never been easy. Most of the Southern States resisted emancipation on the grounds of a reluctance for financial or life-style changes. Good people can make expedient choices instead of moral ones.

Time is healing one form of American slavery, while two others continue to run rampant even here in the land of the free. Like the slavery of the African-Americans, people who have no voice, no constituency, no politician currying their vote, have little chance of remediation of their circumstance. From time to time we are appalled to hear that children are kidnapped for sexual abuse.

But do we stop and think? Are they and the indentured sweatshop workers not slaves, with all that the word slave implies? Are we not complicit if we do not act more vigorously to stamp out this trafficking in humans? Or are we content to see the odd news item and shake our heads in disgust?

Perhaps that makes us guilty by doing nothing even if we know better.

The writer, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.