One
hundred and fifty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation
Proclamation freeing those who were enslaved in The United States.
In
today’s world hundreds of thousands of young children and adults toil in
bondage as labor and sex slaves. Children in third world countries are often
sold by their families to human traffickers as a means of survival in places
where desperation trumps family ties. Closer to home children who run away from
home dispirited and suffering from family abuse and love hunger are prey to the
pimps who recruit them and enslave them. Frequently, sex slaves are beaten,
raped and drug addicted into submission and forced to service some fifteen to
twenty men per day. When their usefulness as sexual commodities is past they
are often dumped like yesterday’s garbage with minds and souls badly damaged
and in need of resurrection and healing.
The
world is quiet. The soporific of ignorance and denial allows this practice to
continue and flourish with the toll on civilization, human dignity and victim
self respect increasing day by day.
East
Portland Rotary has joined the fight against Human Trafficking and we serve as
modern day “Abolitionists” trying to do our part to stamp out this evil
practice of selling and renting our mothers, sisters and daughters for ill
gotten gain by greedy and exploitive puppet masters. Rotarians are people of
conscience who believe that this dehumanizing practice of human trafficking
must stop. We have united with other organizations of like minded mission as
well as individuals who believe that this modern day slavery is wrong. We
believe that all human beings have a right to live free and unchained.
Sir
Edmund Burke once said “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good
men to do nothing”.
What
will you do to be a part of the solution to the problem of this modern day
slavery?
Richard
Lazere on behalf of East Portland Rotary
