Shackled

Slavery. How can one word pack so much punch? Its ugliness is a nagging reminder of humanity’s venomous potential. To the people attached to it like a footnote, skin color is a curse, pain a birthright, and history a quiltwork of scars. To them, it wasn’t just a blemish in America’s storied past, it was an indefinite prison sentence to their dreams, a coffin where they buried their future. 

America’s acquisition of slaves may have ended with the Emancipation Proclamation; but generations of people continue to feel the figurative sting of the whip, wince at the clanking of chains, and cower at the thought of a dark room filled with shadows of a past that’s long gone. The slave ships may have sailed but its wake continues to ripple even after the last piece of paper was signed with a declaration of “freedom”.

Did you think that slavery ended with the desegregation of schools and buses? Or perhaps with the success of the civil rights movement? Or with the election of America’s first black president? No, slavery did not end. It continues to persist in our society in ways more pervasive and with more cunning taskmasters. 

A 10-year-old living on the streets of Manila, scrounging for morsels of food to survive the day; dreaming of a table filled with treats for Christmas dinner; he wants a better life but don’t know how to get it. When you live in a society where you are free to dream of anything you want but have no means to achieve it, are you really free? 

A Filipino domestic worker in Kuwait who receives decent wages from their employer but have to suffer physical, emotional, and sexual abuses; they’re free to leave and go back home but can’t because their family’s survival depend on the money they earn. When you have the freedom to make choices, but your options are between a rock and a hard place, are you really free? 

A 20-year-old in Guatemala, wanting to leave a city entrenched in drug-related crimes, gang wars, and political unrest and flee to a country where peace (and opportunity) could be had but don’t know which would one would accept him. When your freedom is contingent on the chances others give you, are you really free?

A single mother in Chicago raising 3 kids, working 4 jobs to pay the bills, and saddled with ridiculous middle class taxes; she feels doomed to a life of paycheck to paycheck. If you have the freedom to do whatever you want but don’t have the time to do so because you work 20 hours a day, are you really free?

Poverty shackles people to their debts and binds their ankles with responsibilities they can’t fulfill. It throws them in a small 4x4 cell where they wake up to its four walls of hunger, anger, hopelessness, and depression. Its taskmasters have the power to end it but don’t or won’t. Their faces look different, the color of their skin has changed, and the methods they employ are more subtle. But the resounding crack of their whips as they echo down the halls of underfunded schools is unmistakable. The rattle of the chains they carry co-mingle with the sound of gun shots in economically-depressed neighborhoods. 

And we, those of us who stand by and watch and do nothing, we are complicit. Though we lack the political, social, or economic clout to make a dent in this crisis, we are equally culpable! With every indifferent stare or averted gaze, we clamp on those manacles. With every half-hearted statement of concern or insincere prayer, we turn the key on those dank prison cells. With every wasteful spending or every leftover food trashed, we throw our fists at their already bruised and battered faces. 

When so many of our neighbors, fellow citizens, brothers and sisters are in chains, are we really free?

One rotten apple...