Cranky Activism

I really don’t want to write, talk, or think about human trafficking today. I’m working on the second draft of my book, and I’m tabling for Breaking Free at a community event this weekend, and I just don’t want to talk about it. I know how people are going to react when I tell them the facts, the shocked looks, the absurd questions, the disbelief and outrage. Those are all appropriate, that is how people should react when they hear this for the first time. But it’s not my first time, it’s my thousandth time. And because it’s my thousandth time, I start to wonder how many more people need to hear this and experience that shock and disbelief and outrage. Haven’t we been talking about this for years? How are there still people around who don’t know about it? But there are, lots of people. My perception of domestic human trafficking being common knowledge is based on my own skewed sample of activists and non-profits. But I would like to stop telling people that this exists, and start telling them what they can do to make it better. I’d like to start a conversation with: “We all know this is an issue, what are we going to do about it?” I would like the first part of that sentence to be true. Because it’s hard to have hope that things are going to get better, that the injustice can be defeated, when I still spend most of my time convincing people that it’s a problem.

In other news, I should always work out in the morning, because I get awfully cranky when I don’t.

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