From Waffle Whiffer

This is a coupon - hand it over at a cash register and you can save money, either through a discount or a rebate.  This year in the U.S. alone, 2.6 billion - yep billion - coupons will be redeemed.

Redeem - our current day usage of the word tells a million stories.  Redeeming is as easy as handing something over to a stranger in the middle of the middle.  The tools for redeeming come every Sunday morning, in your local newspaper, chock full of offers to save you money and make luxuries affordable.

This year - in the U.S. alone - we will redeem coupons for approx. $8 billion.  Imagine for a minute a huge mountain of all the stuff that these coupons offered a discount on, imagine a mountain of the rebates that we placed in our bank accounts to buy more stuff - imagine what these coupons redeem and what they get us.  Imagine their value.

Now imagine that mountain being made of fellow human beings.  27 million of them.  Mostly women and children.  All of them for sale.  More people for sale than the 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade.  Women in Asia for $8,000.  Child soldiers in Northern Africa for $12,000.  Teenage girls from Mexico available in places like Austin, Dallas, Cincinnati or Minneapolis for $4,000.  People bought & sold in markets and back alleys.

There is no need to imagine this - it is happening.  Imagine the value of these lives.  Think about the value of a life when it can be bought & sold, when people are commodities for commercial sex or insurgent violence.  Feel the loss of freedom, the loss of life that comes with being owed by someone else.  Listen to the hope that breathes & sings in your heart, the hope to sing redemption songs with these fellow human beings.

Feel like you want to do something ?  Here's a coupon I hacked together - redeem it by clicking it or going to this site or this Facebook Cause.

No one should be for sale - it is our time to become abolitionists !