Compromising my principles for a girl

This woman I know posted a notice on Facebook about a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking, and specifically sex slavery. Normally I wouldn’t take interest in an awareness walk. I mean, I like walking, but I don’t like protests. But this particular woman I used to have a crush on, okay, let’s be honest, I sort of still have a crush on her. She’s the only female I know my age with conservative values (which shows what kind of liberal bubble I live in—and am trying to burst!), and such a rare person stands out to me, although I haven’t seen her in years. She lives in New Jersey.

I decided to look up the organization the awareness walk is supposed to be raising money for. It’s called Stop Child Trafficking Now. According to their website, unlike other anti-slavery organizations, Stop Child Trafficking Now doesn’t focus on rescuing individual victims from abuse. Instead, their goal is to have governments arrest and prosecute criminals who are involved with human trafficking. Specifically, they want the US military to hunt down traffickers in the same way they do with terrorists.

Now I don’t know exactly how they plan to implement these goals, but something about the concept rubs me the wrong way. While I think that human trafficking is a loathsome practice and its purveyors should be brought justice, I am hesitant in advocating that the US military should police the world. The counterargument is that if we don’t do it, who will? We are one of the few countries in the world with the resources to stop criminal practices that are undoubtedly perpetuated by political corruption so that local governments are accessories to the crim. But I am of the mind that our military presence and our habit of using a military solution for world problems has a negative impact with unforeseen consequences. I can’t help but wonder and wish that there could be a better, more creative solution.

Incidentally, this last weekend during the hurricane I finally got around to watching Ron Howard’s The Missing, a western that came out a few years back. I always meant to watch it because I like Ron Howard, but it’s over two hours long and very serious, so I kept putting it off. The Missing, as it happens, is about child trafficking for sexual slavery, which I had not known. Cate Blanchett’s daughter gets kidnapped by this Indian witch doctor and his gang of thieves, who intend to sell the girl as a whore to Mexican pimps. So Cate Blanchett teams up with her estranged father, Tommy Lee Jones, who, years ago, left his family in pursuit of Indian ways, but showed up around the time of the kidnapping because a medicine man told him that he needed to protect his family if he wanted to be fully healed of a rattlesnake bite.

The premise of the film is obviously not very politically correct, and it made me wonder what caused Ron Howard to take on the project (it isn’t characteristic of his style) and if the story is based on some real incident or if it was merely trying to be incredibly cliché. I think few people are aware that the western story originated in the form of captivity tales. Captivity tales became a popular genre of literature in the 19th century during western expansion of the States. Presumably, the first of these tales published were actual accounts of people who had been kidnapped by Indians and subsequently rescued. But the true life stories proved so popular that soon fictional accounts were produced. I learned about this at the Rosenbach Museum, because Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach was a collector of captivity tales and the museum probably houses the world’s largest collection of them. So, The Missing fits well into the western movie category, harking back to the origins of the genre. See The Searchers starring John Wayne for a similar example.

To be honest, I didn’t really like movie all that much. It was too simplistic and too violent, much of it seemed to try to deliberately disturb the viewer. But what struck me about it was how it presented a situation in which violence was absolutely the only option for the protagonist unless she wanted her daughter to be sold into a life of constant rape. I came away from the movie thinking, well, that is certainly a case where violence is warranted. Of course there is the argument that if white people hadn’t driven the Indians off their land and into hostility against the States then the Indians wouldn’t have kidnapped their women. But this movie is not about the big picture. It doesn’t address sociological causes. It is about a single incident in which a women must fight for her daughter’s life. (Furthermore, in the film, Cate Blanchett happens to be a doctor, and the opening sequence depicts her treating an old Indian women, so she is absolved from the sins of her race.)

So I watched this movie, was mildly captivated by it (ha-ha, just kidding) and then I hear about the human trafficking awareness walk. Being a person who doesn’t believe in coincidence, I can’t help but think that God is trying to draw my attention to something. But what is the message? In the current crisis, which Stop Child Trafficking Now wants to address, the big picture is that human trafficking happens, not because of imperialistic expansion, but because the world has evil in it, and when this evil is given the opportunity to work, it manifests itself in the most horrendous ways. No not-for-profit organization is capable of culling the motivations of criminals who sell and buy children for sex. Other organizations attempt to rescue children from these situations, one at a time, but unfortunately this does not stop the illicit transactions from occurring, and there is a chance that it makes the human trafficking market more profitable by increasing the scarcity of the “product.” Is this a situation, like in The Missing, where violence is warranted?

It seems that the choice is between using force to stop a horrible crime, or allowing it to continue by not acting. Really, the bigger picture solution is stronger communities that instill a greater sense value for both a human life and appropriate sexual behavior. Such communities should be able to police themselves and stop these crimes at the root. There is probably a good argument that although hunting down and prosecuting criminals with the military is a longer term solution than saving one child at a time, the even longer term solution of a strengthening community is undermined by a foreign military presence. It’s a delicate balance, these problems and solutions where governmental powers are involves, and I can’t say I have the answer.

Either way, this probably wouldn’t affect my decision making process over whether or not I go to the awareness walk, because the only real reason I would consider going is to see this woman. For those of you who are more interested in my crush on her than anything else I’ve been talking about, I have to say, my chances aren’t great. A few years ago, I made it plain that I wanted a romantic relationship with her and she said she just wanted to be friends, so I stopped hanging out with her. Now, I think we’re on good terms, but she rarely responds to my comments on her Facebook wall, and I sent her a text message yesterday, to which she also has not responded. So I don’t know if I would be a welcome presence at this awareness walk or not. I’m hesitant to sign up for it in advance. Maybe I’ll just show up and see what happens.

Hello. I am not God.

For some time, a few months maybe, I’ve had the idea for this blog, a blog of serious ideas and personal reflections on ideas, but I do not know how to begin. It seems appropriate to articulate some scope of the subjects I might hope to address here and I’d like to believe that this first post will be the hardest one. Of course, any definition I put here will be limited and I cannot foresee the full breadth of topics that might be touched upon. But in my hesitation, ideas have come and gone for which I regret not writing on. So it is with a small amount of urgency that I mount the task of this writing project, with hopes that it becomes something to instigate personal growth within me and inspiration to those readers it draws.

The title of this entry should be an obvious fact to most individuals, obvious to the point where it is almost absurd to state. Clearly, I am not God, and if I seem to imply that there was really any question, one might accuse me of illusions of grandeur. Yet, I think if put differently, the question of whether or not we (each of us) think we are God is really the contemporary crisis of common humanity’s philosophy (or religion), at least in Western Civilization. For clarity, instead of asking, Am I God, might I not ask, who do I worship?

Even if in responding to this question the answer seems clear. I don’t, or at least I try not to, worship myself. Instead, I try to worship God, who is truth, goodness, rightness, lovingness, creatorness, etc. All of these things which I have identified as aspects of God, because I have been taught that they are aspects of God, make God worthy of my worship. Thus while, I might have to fight my selfish desires on a daily basis, I can measure my success by how well I am able to devote myself to God that day.

This response to the question is coming from one who has been culturally attuned to a particular understanding of God that is built upon tradition which has changed over time but in general holds a benevolent view of God. But there are other cultural stances which do not hold this view of God, or most often more accurately deny that the benevolent aspects listed above are attributable to any god, though in most cases they acknowledge the benevolence of such attributes apart from a god. Holders of such a stance might say, There is no god, but there is goodness.

So we come to the question of what is goodness. This becomes more tricky because what some people think to be good, others may think is bad, or at least not “good.” In a recent conversation in my cell group, someone made the statement, “I feel uncomfortable saying what things are right and what things are wrong.” Fopr reference, this was in a conversation about sexual behavior. To me this statement was fairly astounding, particularly because the other cell members seemed to be in agreement. Of course I’ve heard such sentiments expressed widely in a secular humanist context, but here I was among a group of Christians who all seemed to have a similar evangelical sort of background and they had misgivings about saying what is right and wrong.

Their misgivings really aren’t shocking when viewed in a wider context. Among today’s “intellectuals,” or the higher educated, the widely agreed upon understanding of truth is that it is impossible to for any individual to identify the Truth, which is absolute, if such a thing exists, because all conceptions of truth are corrupted by individual experience. Experiences in which we are actually present are our most direct encounter with actual truth, beyond that our understanding of the world is based on the accounts of others, whose reliability may vary. This understanding of the world in turn affects how we interpret the experiences in which we are present. Even our direct perception of reality may then be distorted by unreliable information we have received from outside sources. No one can presume that every source is reliable, so based on our understanding of reality, we must pick which sources we think best convey the truth, even though our understanding is shaped by sources in our development which we were unable to pick and which may be unreliable.

Thus the consensual conclusion among the higher educated is that truth is not ascertainable, so we must rely on our personal sense of what truth is, and subsequently, our personal sense of goodness can only be defined by we as individuals for ourselves. With this in mind, we return to the question of who do we worship and it takes on a slightly different meaning. If our only conception of goodness is what we define for ourselves, if no one else has the “right” to tell us what is right, then the god of our worship is not the God of truth, but a god of our understanding, a small and unreliable god based on an unreliable understanding of goodness.

Too often, I feel that even those of us who are Christian fall into this flawed habit of relying on our own sense of what is right, or in other words, what is “right for me.” We lose trust in the communal understanding of rightness if it seems to disagree with our personal sense. Or we pick and choose, saying the community cannot discern this particular truth. This is understandable when considering the cycle unreliability in human interactions discussed above, but to reject community in preference to our own discernment we run the risk of rejecting the God of truth in preference for the God of ourselves.

I am not saying that the God of community or tradition is perfect and without flaw. I am only rejecting the notion that the truth is unascertainable and the subsequent irrational conclusion that therefore we must settle for a flawed truth we construct solely from our own experiences. Truth instead can be realized through a give and take process with the community, where we are constantly processing and re-processing our ideas among those around us. This is how we become more reliable to both ourselves and others.

Thus is the scope of this blog, a give and take process in pursuit of the truth and in search of a God that does not fit inside our personal definitions. Perhaps this first post is a bit confused and badly argued. There’s a lot more to be said for sure (…and I’ve been writing at work in between customer service phone calls). Hopefully future entries will provide better more thought out points, or more interesting stories. In the meantime, I hope you can take something away from it and give something back with your comments.