When 14-year-old Margie Rabbit walked out of the girls' changing room at the Expo Park pool, wearing the daring two-piece suit, I was pleased to have been a victim of human trafficking.
I belonged to a crew of young teens under the thumb of a slaver who hauled us from field to field where we toiled in the hot sun, cleaning corn and cockle burrs from the soybeans for the profiteering ogre who owned the land. No sooner had we satisfied one such parasite than the crew master trafficked us off to another, hoes chopping and machetes swinging.
I was free to quit only if I was willing to forgo a Saturday afternoon ritual, the ceremonial distribution of envelopes containing money.
I hated the work. On the other hand, it was my best opportunity that July for wherewithal to invite Margie for Sunday swims and hamburger-and-malted dinners afterwards. All on me. Damn the expense.
It's funny how easily the capitalist power structure was able to exploit my weaknesses, and I, for one, welcome the social advances of the 21st Century where
agents of my government conspire to spare young men such inconvenience and (Dare I say it?) indignity.
It's from Stranded in Iowa, and for my money the post of the week, at least.
2 comments:
Greetings from another exploited youth, though exploited by family.
Only after much therapy can I now contemplate the horrors of hours spent on the unpadded and unshaded seat of that old Ferguson TO-20, turning endless swaths of cut alfalfa into the windrows that would later turn into the monstrous bales that I would have to help load and haul to that overheated and dusty barn.
It so warped me for life that I cannot join the local Occupy movement and protest the injustice.
God save us from elected public servants and the bureaucracy they create! If only they had had the opportunity to learn life lessons on family farms!
:)
The TO-20 is interesting. There are a few still running here, mostly in the hands of collectors who have to keep explaining, "No, it is NOT, a 9N Ford."
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