Hero is … um

Please allow me to be serious for a few moments here:

Along with dozens of other webcomic creators, I’m asking my readers to take a minute to check out The Comic Creator’s Alliance and consider helping to fight human trafficking.

According to current estimates, there are more people in slavery now than at any time in the 1700s or 1800s. Most of these slaves are girls in Southeast Asia who are forced into vile prostitution rings. Many end up in this situation by being kidnapped. Obviously, they never get the chance for anything resembling a free, happy life.

According to the anti-trafficking organization Love146:

• 2 children per minute are sold into this sick form of slavery
• 1.2 million children are trafficked annually
• 27 million people are enslaved worldwide
• $32 billion is generated annually by human trafficking

But it’s not just a sick problem halfway around the world. Take a look at the Gracehaven website to find out how bad things are in the U.S.

After an incident that hit too close to home for her, Lora Innes, the creator of the web-and-print comic The Dreamer put together a project to seek the help of webcomickers in raising money and awareness. I found out about the project after hearing an interview with her on the Comic Geek Speak podcast and wanted to help in any way I could. Lora’s project is to enlist creators to submit an original drawing of one of their female characters for inclusion in a special-edition jam piece, which will be sold as a computer wallpaper with all proceeds to be donated to charity. Even though this is a young comic with a slight following, Lora was gracious enough to allow me to participate in her project, and I sent an image of my character Aerobat in flight.

I ask — no, beg — you to get involved in some way to help combat this scourge that our detached, uninvolved society blithely ignores. As a husband, a father, and relation to someone who was raped, I am vehemently opposed to any and all human slime who would so enslave, violate and destroy. Get informed. Get involved. Literally millions of people need help.

You can contribute by purchasing the webcomic wallpaper when it’s ready, and you can support Love146 and/or Gracehaven as they help fight traffickers directly. Another suggestion is to sponsor a child through Compassion International. The Love146 website says that organization does not offer child sponsorship because they see that as not much different from the “commoditization” of humans that they battle. While I can understand and respect that view, I know from my family’s sponsorship of a girl in Indonesia, this is an organization that works to feed, clothe, educate and nurture children in the third world. These children are treated as valued individual creations of a loving God. We trade correspondence with our sponsored child in a carefully managed, transparent and respectful way. In a part of the world where darkness and evil make it dangerous to be a child, our sponsored friend and her friends are shown a better, brighter, more hopeful path. Compassion gives us the opportunity to share goodness (full disclosure, I have a close relative who works for Compassion).

However you see fit to help stop the soul-crushing evil of human trafficking, please find a way to contribute.