As I write this, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments about whether a company can own a human gene. It’s not quite as sexy a topic as same-sex marriage, so we’ll likely not hear much about it during the day or on the evening news, but it strikes me as one of the most important cases SCOTUS will decide this year.
A friend wrote on Facebook the other night her extreme displeasure with human trafficking. In the context of the article to which she linked, she was talking about sex trafficking – prostitution, we used to call it, but that word has come to apply to so many other things, and trafficking is an uglier word when applied to buying and selling human resources.
Ah! another interesting, depersonalizing, word: human resources. Not human to be loved and respected, but resource to be exploited.
How is human trafficking different than any other retail transaction, I asked. As was said in the 1972 movie, “The Godfather,” it’s nothing personal. Just business.” Business, I have been often reminded, is about giving a job to someone who wants one, selling the fruits of their labors to desirous buyers, and raking off the profits therefrom.
My friend thought me “completely insensitive to the issue for degrading it to a retail transaction.” Mayhaps I was not as clear as I intended, though I understood her passion.
Until we begin to acknowledge that all exploitation is wrong, we will not end – or at least begin to end – all exploitation. To equate human trafficking with retail commerce is not degrading human trafficking to a retail transaction. I merely pointed out that had already been done.
War too often is sold as a patriotic undertaking, and often it is.
But more often it is a laboratory for weapons research. Afghanistan has become the laboratory and advertising venue for UAVs – Unmanned Airborne Vehicles, or drones. It is a business that is spreading worldwide, most notably into Africa and certain U.S. police departments. Allegedly, U.S. companies are selling only unarmed drones to non-U.S. military customers, but if we can put weapons on them, why should we presume anyone else is incapable of figuring out how to arm theirs?
Vietnam, for those of us old enough to remember why some wonks draw parallels to Afghanistan, turned out to be a flag-draped subsidy for Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas and Chrysler. Nearly every military vehicle that wasn’t a Big Truck was a Chrysler, the F-4 Phantom fighter jet was McDonnell-Douglas, and Lockheed built spy planes.
Men often were referred to simply as “cannon fodder.” They kept our eyes on the soldiers while the real industry was building weapons.
While industries love to tout the jobs they create, too much of the work involves laboring for wages insufficient to purchase shelter, heat, food, and medical care on which the laborer’s family depends. And during the recent recession, the majority of public sector layoffs, touted by politicians as curtailment of wasteful spending, were women – whose jobs as clerks rendered them disposable.
I do understand why a woman should be so incensed at the idea of sex-slavery – as well as I can, being a man. We have legislators writing laws restricting women’s rights to the same pleasures men take for granted, while at least some of us decry the surgical procedures some cultures use to the same end. A man can disappear into the mountains on a hiking trip, but if the woman becomes pregnant there are those who decree she shall bear the results to birth.
That’s not much changed from my youth, when a young man’s sexual prowess was something to brag about, but the girl he did it with was not one to “bring home to mother.”
As long as we accept that those at one end of the pay scale – whether they are men, women or children, or merely their genes – are simply resources from which those at the other end are encouraged to profit, we are not going to even begin to reduce the trade in human trafficking.
Photo by kalacaw