A Walk Across the Sun

I've been struggling for the past week,vacillating back and forth as to whether or not to do a blog post on this. When I finally made up my mind to do it, the picture wouldn't download this morning and I almost gave up the idea. I try to shy away from controversial subjects for the most part. I don't want to use this blog to discuss politics or religion, although I have strong feelings about both subjects. There are some things that must be addressed though, and even though I understand there isn't a large readership here, and I may offend some by what I write, I'm willing to take that chance in order to be a voice for the exploited and the innocent. I recently read  A Walk Across the Sun, by Corban Addison. I liked the cover and I was impressed by the fact that famous author, John Grisham,commented on the back.Over the course of twenty years he's had multiple authors request an endorsement,but he's always declined until the author of this book. He gave it a ringing endorsement which caught my eye. The book is a novel... fiction, but it's based on reality, the trafficking of human beings, which the author states is a thirty billion dollar a year criminal enterprise. I would venture to say that most of the victims are women and often young children. There are places in the far east where sex tourism is commonplace and the perverts who attend these places are in search of children. Though it is illegal, it still goes on with enough frequency to generate these huge profits. The author also states that in Eastern Europe there is a depressingly high rate of girls who were orphans being lured into prostitution by the traffickers once they are no longer in state care. Much like the illegal drug trade, people wouldn't be engaging in trafficking if it wasn't profitable. I can't think of anything much more distressing than to be forced to do something so inhumane and degrading than prostitution and to feel so helpless to stop it as these women and children are. I have five daughters and five granddaughters and I promise I would go to extremes without mercy if they were ever to suffer such abuse as I read about in this book. The author provides the web addresses of several organizations that provide data on this subject.
The U.S.Dept. of State provides a Trafficking In Persons report (www.state.gov/g/tip) He states that one of the best non-governmental sources of data on the trade is the Polaris Project in Washington D.C. (http://www.polarisproject.org/) . He goes on to list others as well as other books that delve into the subject deeper, one of which is titled Disposable People by Kevin Bales. The title is telling; are certain people disposable? Are there less desirable members of society who we could care less about, who don't really matter? Is it ok to let them fall through the cracks to be used and later discarded like a dirty tissue? I'll tell you frankly, I'm going out on a limb here, I'm out of my league on this one, but just because I've never been exposed directly to this problem doesn't mean it doesn't impact me. If we are silent on this issue then when will we speak? The world is in dire need of hero's. I hope that if this is an issue that bothers you, you'll investigate it more and let your voice be heard.Thanks