Faith + Reason = Truth

The clothes you buy.  The electronics you have purchased.  Things that have the words "Made in China" or Hecho en Mexico" imprinted on them.  Bananas.  Diamonds.  Gold.

If you buy these products or virtually any other type of product that's grown or mined or manufactured in some way in a country other than America or a handful of others, you are directly supporting and personally benefiting from a contemporary form of slave labor.  But you may protest, "I NEED those things though!" and you may be correct in some cases.  But do you "need" the cheapest or best valued and shadiest versions of them?  Could you choose to spend a little more and get a legitimately produced version of the same thing?  Of course you could.

Since mankind began recording its activities, we have records of people enslaved by other people.  We still engage in the practice today, though it's almost universally condemned across societies.  The problem is that at the time it is occurring, many people do not recognize their contemporary forms of enslavement as morally objectionable; to the contrary, they embrace it as the way things are and must be.  So it was with the Egyptians and the Hebrews, the Spartans and the Helots, the Romans and the Slavs (from whence our word "slave" derives), the Europeans and whichever people found itself in the unfortunate circumstance of being indigenous to the lands that were "discovered" by the colonial powers around the globe - and once the supply of New World natives ran out, the forcibly exported Africans.

All of these societies viewed their enslavement of other races as their divine right.  The gods (later, God) smiled on them and blessed them with free and plentiful labor to accomplish what needed to be done in all facets of society:  building, growing, warfare, production of goods.  If people lost their battles and wars, they knew it would be their fate to be enslaved.  Not that they freely accepted their fates or were ok with it; in fact, the ferocity of battle was frequently ratcheted up to the extent that the combatants would do anything in their power to avoid capture and enslavement for themselves and their families, including death for all of them.

And so it is with our society.  We now view slave-wage and forced labor as acceptable, especially since many of us are so far removed from the actual working conditions of the sweatshops and mines.  I would say that, at least in the cruel days of African slaves working in the agricultural fields of the American South, the owners provided food and shelter for the people who were enslaved.  Many of today's slave class work in far worse conditions and have no food or shelter provided for them, but it is true that they are free to pursue something different.

For instance, in the Mexican border towns just south of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, people could choose to pursue a better life in a land with greater opportunity:  America.  All they need to do is try to emigrate from Mexico to the U.S. legally (which would take years if it happened), or take their chances sneaking across the border.  Again, just as the ancient warriors faced with the prospect of enslavement or possible death, they may choose possible death as the preferable course of action.  Not just for themselves, but by sacrificing themselves for the prospect of better lives for their families that may or may not yet exist.

Do I propose a solution here?  No.  But I do imply that certainly 100 years from now, and maybe only 20-50 years from now, "civilized" societies will look back on today's reality and wonder how we could have been so brutal and barbaric to one another, just as we look back at the America of the 1960's and wonder the same thing.