Courtesy A. Carillo

    




I woke up in that sheet-tousled, beaded sweat kind of way. A residual headache moved into my threshold of my awareness as I turned to face the half-open window next to my cot.


I could hear rain falling outside. My glasses were on the nightstand just where I discarded them. I reached out with languid dexerity to put them on again to confirm that the leaves on the shrubs were in movement.


I thought about how the rain would likely pass and how I liked that it did this, contrary to the furious unleash I had known to expect for days--sometimes weeks in the Northwest. Still turned over in bed, I thought some more. It wasn't time for a shower yet.

Yesterday was heavy with an expectant heat. A newcomer, I stumbled around the concrete between the Capitol building and the Senate offices in whatever fabric intolerably trapped my sweat against me. I bet it was Polyester.


I was not supposed to be thinking about sweat. I was there to have something to say to the legislative aides of Congressman Blumenhauer and Schrader, to the staff of Senator Wyden and Merkley. But how does one deal honestly with the emotional weight of reality that 27 million human beings are OWNED? It just seems absurd to me that I use that statistic without time to paint the picture of the brutishness, the ugly depravity, the desperate humanity that is the life of even a single slave.


All that ripples in the shallow pool of the political conscience is prioritized to foreign and domestic. I wanted to ask where the deep end was. I couldn't find how to shove slavery into either category with satisfaction. It is just heinous and that is all. In the world of budgets and other middle-sized objects, my colleague and I spoke of the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act and how Oregon representatives could show their support to co-sponsor the bill. The meetings were positive and the aides showed what I ascertained to be genuine concern.


The cry of the suffering is never far off, but when we push it enough away, we won't have to listen. Or we can hear it, as surely as rain falling outside and confirm that our fears about our neighbors are more real than the tsunami that came crashing into Japan. As Gary Haugen said in his speech for the Global Prayer Gathering, reality always wins. When we begin to see the world falling all around us into broken pieces then we will care enough to begin fixing it. Nevermind the excuses and our generally large incompetence to do so. Justice was never a longing birthed in the heart of man, but that of God. I wish I cared about it more even at this moment but it's funny how something like a little comfort changes me.

Suddenly, I'm on a different level and continent and suddenly, that sub-human treatment of human beings becomes something that just can't quite be measured correctly in statistics. Or the criminal enterprise of the sex trade becomes tricky to pinpoint--so let's not overreact. This could be what Jesus meant when he said: he who has ears, let him hear! Truth involves more than perception, but an act of the will.