Melody Curtiss

This ruin is a monument and testimony to the greatest atrocities that we visit upon one another, similar to the barbed wire, mounds of shoes and furnaces on display at Auschwitz. Bunce Island was once a fortressed prison to hold men, women and children who had been kidnapped in Africa in order to process them for enslavement.

Do not imagine this is the last vestige of this injustice. Yes, there are still men, women, and children being sold, violently kidnapped by strangers, or exploited by deceit. The location of prisons where they are held may not be so obvious to us, as the public condemnation of slavery turned the practice into an illegal act.

But these prisons are still all around us, and the enslaved held in their walls are treated like commodities to be sold to end-users like robotics, computers and telephones, serving in households, businesses, and criminal enterprises all across the globe, with the USA still being a common destination and some of the most ardent end-users of enslaved humans live here with us. As long as the act itself remains profitable, and we don’t manage to purge the desire to objectify and oppress for personal gain from the human psyche or soul of America, I expect it will continue.

When I tell you that these fortresses of enslavement are still in existence today, that vulnerable people are overpowered and held against their will for profit, they are enslaved and their bodies commodified for the use of others, I know you are envisioning the basements and boarded up buildings you’ve seen in the movies and on TV. Horrifically, that does happen. But more horrid than that, this is not the whole picture of enslavement in America. It is no longer the gangs of thugs who kidnap via violence and con artists who use deception to entice their victims.

Enslavement is no longer just what people do in the shadows, and mass enslavement is growing in popularity in America. I hope that offends you. It does me, too, and I wish I were making this up.

I will own my abolitionist tendencies, as I think the US over-criminalizes and over-imprisons as a knee-jerk reaction whenever powerful people feel personally vulnerable. I cannot count the number of times I watched politicians introduce legislation to make something that was illegal, illegal. It is a daily occurrence in every legislative body in our nation, from the lowest to highest level, wasting our money for them to engage in the process so they can pretend to be engaged in the people’s work they were hired to do, and making no real changes and no improvements whatsoever. To be sure – real reform through legislation is a joke because our legal system is less about justice and more about maintaining power or the appearance of power in the hands of those who set up the system. We aren’t told the truth about the research, processes that make a difference, or lasting generational harms created through the system we have installed. Let me stop there. I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit-hole. It will be a topic of subsequent posts that fall on the extreme left end of my usual middle-of-the-road perspective on political matters. Hopefully, I will still have rights to free speech and opinions then.

I served my country in the USMC – and I was a willing prisoner of the military industrial complex, selling my body into service and obligation to whatever whimsical rules were imposed on me by Marine Corps superiors. Do not be overly confused by me, like Walt Whitman once said, I am multitudes. I am a patriot. I love America. I am undeniably American through and through. I am 100% proud of my service, and I stand and cry when I hear the Marine Corps Anthem and the Stars and Stripes.

But I am a product of my boomer-hippy generation with all its eccentricities and contradictions. I treat the symbols of my country with honor, but I honor them because of the underlying foundations of democracy, justice, fairness, and compassion I have been taught to uphold under those symbols, and I believe 100% in my right to burn the flag I salute in protest, whenever it suits me. I am offended by the notion that the American flag is more sacred than the sacred American right to talk back to politicians and disagree with their political agendas and legislated priorities. I am infuriated by the proposed criminalization of civil protest, and idolatry of symbols, rather than respect for the values they symbolize. My generation ended the draft, rather than extending it to non-military public service. Maybe we should have thought of a different way to increase our obligations as citizens while retaining personal autonomy over our lives. Sorry, another rabbit-hole moment – also a later topic.

This post is more specific to how capitalizing imprisonment can quickly lead into prisoner exploitation. I don’t see any valid rationale to claim differences between that and other forms of comodification and enslavement. Capitalized enslavement operations are increasingly being funded by our government, their initial capitalization is supported by our tax-payer dollars, with a blind eye to the other commercial ventures, exploitations and profits from human imprisonment. It is carried out under disguise as crucial components of the America First agenda. Always there under the surface, they are emboldened by the possibilities of unrestrained conduct and exponential growth in profit, and they are rising into the public view. You would think we would draw back in disgust and horror and take to the streets en masse in support of the American values being violated. Some are, but so many are not, that we are ineffective in our collective resistance to this nightmare. Even witnessing how these operations are starting to spread, eroding values, degrading justice and victimizing people who have not committed any crimes, forty-two percent of our population remain convinced the America First agenda is good for America. They don’t see the truth, or they can’t let themselves believe it.

I am reminded of one of my favorite, but deeply disturbing musicals, The Fantasticks. It is the love story of Luisa and Matt. America is Luisa, with her mask on, ignoring what is happening right in front of her eyes – or worse, seeing it as something quite different. She is reassured and calmed each time she catches a glimpse of reality and becomes disturbed – reassured that what she is witnessing is actually an amazing vision of the life she wants, and not the horror that is being inflicted on poor Matt. Luisa never removed her mask, she recognized the con and her naive complicit witness to Matt’s suffering only after her most prized possession was stolen from her. 

All turns out well in the musical because Luisa realizes she was duped while she has her life left to live. She has time to reconcile with Matt, who has miraculously escaped under his own power. But Matt’s outcome isn’t historically likely, as 6 million Jews and 6.5 million others would testify about the horrors of WWII were they still alive. The living ancestors of 4 million Africans and First Nations people enslaved in the US before and during the Civil War (13% of the entire US population at the time) would definitely agree that the road back from this violation is generations long and uncertain. It exceeds my 3 generation estimate by generations. Even as we decry the “inhumane” behaviors represented by Bunce Island and Auschwitz, we are building private, for-profit prisons in the USA in 2025 to house people picked up off the street for the crime of existing. Our leaders are defining out of existence and legislating away the rights of “others” who do not agree with or fit into the narrative of the America First agenda and Project 2025. Will they next make otherness the basis for enslavement, as Hitler did? When they find that there are too many of those to effectively commodify, will they propose a secret plan to exterminate them as a more cost-effective way to resolve our discomfort and silence their awkward protesting voices? Has that already begun?

We have taken our culturally positive philosophy of caring and sharing as a means to spread peace and prosperity throughout the entire world, making it a safer place to live, and replaced it with a narrative of life as a zero sum game – where we must kill to live, impose poverty so that we might prosper more fully. We are arresting elected officials and citizens for being difficult or oppositional to the agenda. We use our armies, our police, and vigilantes to hunt, capture, and imprison people without recourse to justice. The laws are being changed as I write this to make it easier to do exactly that. Our prized possession – democracy- has been stolen from us.

Will America realize we’ve been duped while we still have life left in us and a chance to recover? Maybe?

I took the photo on the far left while visiting a historic site. It is a tiny island off the West African Coast of Sierra Leone. It represents my deepest questions of whether human decency is an oxymoron.

There is a fireplace still standing that was used to heat the branding irons used to mark the prisoners there. The corridor that families walked down as they sorted them into men, women, and children. Cannons lining the cliff to keep raiders and foreign governments from interceding or disrupting their enterprise operations.

[T]hese fortresses of enslavement are still in existence today… vulnerable people are overpowered and held against their will for profit, they are enslaved and their bodies commodified for the use of others.