…. vs slavery today is the topic of an OpEd by Mona Charen.

Al Sharpton is apparently subdued by news that his ancestors were owned by ancestors of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert described him as “quiet” and “reflective” — states of mind that Herbert acknowledges are “unusual” for the reverend. That qualifies as the understatement of the decade.

Sharpton indicates that the news of his ancestry brought the “complete dehumanization” of slavery home to him, and Herbert takes the opportunity to preach that “Slavery, like the past . . . is not dead. It’s not even past. It’s not something you can wish away.”

No, you can’t wish it away, but it is possible to dwell on it overmuch, as I believe we do in this country. To judge by what my children are learning in school, you’d think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Addams, Longfellow or Fulton).

Meanwhile,

Each year, an estimated 600,000-800,000 men, women and children are trafficked against their will across international borders. According to the White House, 14,500-17,500 of these are trafficked into the United States. Some are forced to work in sweatshops and farms, but most are domestic workers and prostitutes. A typical case is that of “Maria,” a Guatemalan who was lured to the U.S. by a “coyote” when she was 12. Once in Florida, she was raped and forced to submit to prostitution. She did not speak the language and was threatened with violence if she attempted to escape.

What gets me is that most of the countries that seem to turn a blind eye on human trafficking within their borders are the same ones that are permitted to bash the United States within the New York based chambers of the U.N., but I digress.

In Burma, and in several countries in Africa, children as young as 11 are kidnapped and forced to become soldiers. The State Department’s trafficking report quotes a 13-year-old former soldier from Liberia who told of being drugged. “They gave me pills that made me crazy. When the craziness got in my head, I beat people and made them bleed.”

Elsewhere, the exploitation of children for “child sex tourism” is a thriving industry. In Thailand, Cambodia and Costa Rica, as well as other nations, pedophiles traveling from all over the globe are offered their choice of male or female victims from among the poorest classes. The children can be as young as 5.

Howsomever, the international slavery problem (and the smaller, but despicable nonetheless, problem manifest among immigrants right here in the United States) is apparently not an issue to those whose only concern in that arena is to keep the guilt alive among citizens of today for the actions of long dead Americans 140 + years ago, ultimately to gain votes for a political party that was not only the party that created such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and such doctrine as the Jim Crow laws, but also continues to con black Americans that they have their best interests at heart, while actually keeping them down. Not to mention any names, I’ll only give you a hint: It’s not the Republican Party.

Anyway, Mona Charen’s as-always right on column can be read here.