Bought and Sold

IN EVERLASTING MEMORY
OF THE ANGUISH OF OUR ANCESTORS
MAY THOSE WHO DIED REST IN PEACE
MAY THOSE WHO RETURN FIND THEIR ROOTS
MAY HUMANITY NEVER AGAIN PERPETRATE
SUCH INJUSTICE AGAINST HUMANITY
WE THE LIVING UPHOLD THIS
--plaque on wall outside men’s slave dungeon

The dungeons themselves are unextraordinary. Large stone rooms that smell of four hundred year old feces.

But those large stone rooms are not at all ordinary.

They held within their walls thousands of human beings, with names and heartbeats and breath in their lungs and blood in their veins.

These people, with names and heartbeats and breath and blood, their very skin and bones, became something chained and starved, sold and owned.

We’ve made a commodity out of a lot of absurd things in this world…flesh and blood being the most disgusting and lamentable of them all.

But even then, I worry that slavery is something too often connotated as an evil of the past.

And so it is with every fiber of my being that I wish to whisper into the ear of the world that people are indeed still bought and sold, and entire chunks of our humanity are still in chains.

Poverty, hunger, disease, and disparity are, after all, dungeons of their own.

The question begging to be asked, then, is in what ways our own desire to consume and hunger for all things comfortable perpetuates bondage in this world? And what is the name of your master?

The prayer I offer tonight is for the human race. By grace, may we rise from our slumber enough to acknowledge the great weight of these chains, and may we find the desire, strength, and creativity to break them.

Love. Anna