Paradoxes of Faith

Trade: Welcome to America  How do you trust when hope seems lost?    Trade: You’ll Pay for This (Marketed elsewhere as ‘Trade: Welcome to America’) is finally being released in select theaters THIS FRIDAY, September 28th.  After being delayed for nearly half a year, it is time.  I haven’t seen a movie in the theaters in nearly 3 years, mostly because I cannot justify paying $10 for a one-view, two-hour experience (roughly 8 cents per minute of film)…however this movie may tip the balance.   

I only hope that Trade is not an overly-Hollywoodized film that prostitutes a sexy justice issue to make money for a large movie conglomerate while leaving the systems of the world that perpetuate human trafficking untouched and unaltered.  See ‘Blood Diamond’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour’ for Hollywood’s exploitation of an issue to make money and leave the viewer with nearly no tangible way to affect global and local change as a way to respond to the film and the realities it purports to bring to life.     

The danger with an issue like human trafficking is that Trade will drop a bomb in our laps and then leave us to sort out the emotional, moral, economic, and sociological fallout that it creates – with no recourse to affect systemic change other than to give money to some non-profit org.     

There’s nothing wrong with giving money.  However, charity and justice are in no way the same.  Charity doesn’t change the systems and structures that perpetuate injustice.  Charity doesn’t empower others into freedom.  Charity doesn’t allow others to engage the life Jesus created them to live where they have previously been held in bondage.  Charity doesn’t cost us much.  Authentic justice requires all of us.  It may mean we alter our lives, our economies, our living situations, and set down our idols of comfort, convenience, and upward social mobility.     

  I pray that Trade highlights the reality that we are all connected to the issue of human trafficking.  90% of the cocoa that goes into the chocolate you eat passes through slave hands in West Africa.  40% of the steel eventually finding its way into our automobiles originates in slave-labor-dominated kilns in the deep rainforest areas of northern and western Brazil.  This says nothing of the products forced upon us from the GAP (parent of Old Navy and Banana Republic), Wal-Mart, or your average coffee shop or department store.     

How are we to respond to our complicity in the reality of human trafficking, both in our city, across our borders, and in the villages and slums of impoverished, desperate communities?  Where are we perpetuating the system of human trafficking?  Do our retirement funds support companies that abuse slave labor and are guilty of trafficking persons across international borders? (see www.warslavery.org for the scary facts on the Iraq war and where your tax dollars are going)  How are we to respond?  How are we to alter our lives?  Will Trade move us deeply enough that we will forsake our comfort and privilege in favor of releasing others into freedom?   

One can only hope this will be the case.