ONE

A short art piece developed for The Exodus Road, an organization advancing freedom by refusing to let slavery flourish on our watch.

Human Trafficking is a global pandemic that has infected every major city on planet earth. As an issue it is overwhelming for even the experts to think about in terms of stoping it. For those of us on the outside, we have seen the CNN specials, the blurred out faces and grainy undercover footage that portrays the devastating rubble of a landscape that may as well exist on another planet. Even the individuals who are given a voice in these ‘Dateline’ snapshots of human tragedy often do a better job of convincing us that their plight is better left to the hardened tactical teams, the specialized organizations, the “experts”.

It’s true! Most of us lack the knowledge to even begin to conceive of a plan to wage war against a modern atrocity so grand as human trafficking. Perhaps it’s time we stopped looking at trafficking as an issue and started looking at it as people, with names and stories and ideas and wants and things they dream about and favorite songs and their own funny laughs and brown hair and blue eyes and all the things that make us, well, us… people!

ONE is a call to the part of ‘us’ that are free now, today, to reach across the expanse of our own complacent ignorance and not change a world system, not tackle something so grand as a global issue, but rather just to see, to learn the name of, to reach out to, and then to actually save… ONE.