Bereavement

On a plane trip from South America (Chile), I was surrounded by female students returning from a holiday. All were students at Duke University. I found that this group of sorority sisters, each school holiday, would take a trip to some area of the world. I was bewildered with the thoughts of such wealth, such parental indulgence, the very thought that young people attending one of the wealthiest, most expensive universities in the world had the funds to travel to any foreign country they chose just as an education-social experience.

Later, on the same plane, a young man came over and asked me if I had a cigarette, he wanted to smoke. I pointed to the no smoking sign and just told him that I did not smoke. He sat in the seat next to me and talked briefly. At that time, I had a small amount of vision in one eye and I have never forgotten the blackness of his eyes. He had heard me talking to the other students and told me that he was a student on the way to classes in America. From his general demeanor, his obvious very young age, I gathered there was more to his story than he was telling me. In New York, at immigration, and baggage claim, I noticed an older man was there to meet him. I walked up and said Rafael, “I hope you will have a very wonderful time in America”. The older man said, “Don't worry about him, he is not here for a holiday”.

At the end of the Civil War, there was 4 million slaves in the world. Today, there are an estimated 12.3 million slaves in the world, many regularly crossing international borders being bought and sold as sexual toys of wealthy people, both male and female. In America, there are at least 100,000 children on the street engaged in prostitution on any one day. Children are bought and sold in every large American city. Any young girl, lured into a alcohol situation, can readily expect a drug in her drink and then resulting sexual invasion. Both males and females start their prostitution activity at the average age of 13. Many, from broken homes, dysfunctional families, leave home, and are immediately spotted in terminals by those whose job it is to find young lost people.

It starts with having a place to stay, food, and being cared for as they had never been cared for before and slowly the sexual promiscuity involving adults ensues. In Asia, mostly Thailand, Nepal etc, children are bought and sold like furniture. Ever since the first black slaves arrived in Portugal in 1435, the unending slave market towards the Caribbean and America has persisted. One does not hear very much about it anymore but there is probably as much slave trade from Africa to the West as ever particularly involving those of the Muslim faith going from Africa into Europe. So many drown on makeshift boats steered towards Gibraltar, Majorca, The Canary Islands, or even Italy that there is hardly ground for unmarked graves. For instance, around Malaga, on the coast of Spain, many of the drowned are buried. Man's desire to do better is closely manifest in the alien move from Latin America to the United States. Man's inhumanity to man, one's willingness to use another human being for profit accounts for the sex slave market.

Human Trafficking Awareness day is on January 11^th. It is time for world citizens to become aware of this decadent trafficking in human beings. 37 years ago, this month, with the infamous supreme court Roe V. Wade decision, the world became aware of how cheap unborn human life has become. In the past 37 years, since January 1973, fifty million young innocent lives have been murdered. We now have a culture of death in the White House administration leading to the deaths of many more, mothers, fathers, doctors, lawyers, pastors, patriots, probably a pope. Just as important, those who are already born. Think of their innocence. Think of their potential. Think of their promise. We live in a world where the scanning of a naked body at an airport is no big deal to perverts, where pornography and its perusal in slick magazines is no problem to the liberal mindset. We live in a world where childhood innocence is of little value, homosexual couples no big thing. Confusion about sexuality supposedly acceptable to the young mind.

The artist has been so modest putting a rag of cloth around the genitals of our blessed Lord as he hung naked on the cross, when we know that he was shamed by his captors naked, defiled, and debilitated by the most wicked of men...in front of his mother, his mothers' friends and his beloved disciple, John. How deafening the innocence of young people who must lose their security as well as their privacy in the evil slave trade of sexual perversion. It is only when mothers and fathers become as bereaved in the living hell of their lost children as they do in the dying hell of themselves that these matters will change.