Saturday night my wife and I went with some friends from church to see Call + Response, a rockumentary (hadn’t heard that one before) about the human trafficking industry. The DG Blog promoted it a week ago yesterday. It was well done and sobered me to the fact that, among other types of slavery, there are real-life girls who are being forced to have sex with real-life perverts who have real-life money to burn on their defiling passions. It’s a sick trade.
Here’s a description from the movie’s website:
CALL+RESPONSE is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.
Luminaries on the issue such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof, and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first hand account of this 21st century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Rocco Deluca move this chilling information into inspiration for stopping it.
Music is part of the movement against human slavery. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing.
If it’s in your area and still showing, I’d encourage you to see it. Better hurry, though. Most of the show times have come and gone, and the latest I saw was this Thursday the 23rd.
Did anybody else go? What did you think?
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October 21, 2008 at 8:20 am
Phil
A thought hit me this morning. I love anti-trafficking agencies like Garden of Hope (Thailand) and Freedom Firm (India), and plead for their cause. Now, what distinguishes our Christian anti-trafficking from secular humanitarianism? We both agree that these little girls sold into sexual slavery (among other slaves) are suffering so horribly worse than most little girls ever do. I think Jesus would point out: Do you think that because they suffer so horribly, they are victims, unjustly receiving suffering they don’t deserve? No, he would tell us; rather it is presumed-upon mercy that other little girls (and all the rest of us) are not in similar suffering (cf. Luke 13:1-5).
Letting that perspective sink in, I realize, we don’t help the enslaved because we live the free lives they deserve. Rather, we help because they’re living the enslaved lives we deserve, and we’ve been shown mercy.
As awful as their situation is, there are realities of greater consequence. Hell is worse than all they’re experiencing, and the mercy received in Christ is greater than the mercy of being released from physical slavery. So, freely we’ve received mercy (freedom from human slavery and/or from eternity in hell); freely we give.