Thursday, May 15, 2014

There Is No Hope. I Choose To Hope.

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Let me start by observing that every single human being I know -- and this emphatically includes conservatives -- is AGAINST kidnapping schoolgirls and selling them into slavery. Are you nuts?  Of COURSE they are.

Of course we are.

Yet some self-identified "conservative" pundits have been mocking the hashtag bringbackourgirls thing, asking what material good it does.  To them I have only this to say:  moved by the umpteenth hundredth TV article about this, I just made a donation to Anti-Slavery International.  It's not much.  But it's something.

Anti-Slavery International is, at 175 years, the oldest anti-slavery organization in the world.  It is a disgrace that they are still in existence.  You can donate money to them here.

Let's do our small bit to put this organization out of business.


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2 comments:

David Stone said...

I wasn't aware of people mocking that movement overtly (which is shameless pandering to the worst kind of jerks), but I have read articles that ask why we pay so much attention to this but remain relatively unaware of things like a massacre of 300 villages by BH in the same area.

I think the answer is that people have more than enough space in their hearts for all of this. It's the media (in the US at least) that fails us. They only have so much bandwidth and they squander too much of it on non-stories that happen to have good video footage, like today's heroic cat video.

Michael Swanwick said...

I agree. The same bastards responsible for this atrocity have committed many more. And there are so many monsters in the world that compassion fatigue is a real problem. The world is large and we are small. There are more evils than any one of us can address. I gave up hope long ago.

But that didn't let me off the hook. Kurt Vonnegut ended PLAYER PIANO with his doomed protagonists offering a toast "for the record." That's been my moral touchstone ever since.

To all the fascists, schoolgirl kidnappers, mass murderers, purveyors of cruelty and torture and despair, here is my middle finger, extended.

For the record.