oakbeat

Taken

So yesterday my husband and I went to watch the new movie, “Taken.” It’s about the daughter of a former government secret agent who gets kidnapped during a trip to Europe by Albanian thugs who poach young female tourists in Paris. These girls are then heavily drugged, and then sold into the human sex trafficking business in Europe.  Some girls are forced into street prostitution, others are chained to beds in “brothels,” and others populated into compartmentalized booths in the steel enclaves of operation centers in large construction sites, unconscious, awaiting the long line of anxious men who stand outside to pay “cover” to relieve their pent up sexual bodily functions for a price they cannot afford on the streets. Virgins, however, deemed “pure” and valuable, are immediately ushered away to sold to a wealthy and well-connected French American luminary in Paris. They are primped and prepped for the world’s most discrete and high-class auction house of virgin girls, with the starting bid in the low six-figures. The father, played by Liam Neeson, hears his daughter’s kidnapping while on speaking with her on the phone from California, and rushes to rescue her. The movie is then a sequence of various ’rounds’ of discovery and encounters in his search for his daughter, his secret service training and connections enabling him to outwit, outmaneuver and conquer the Albanian villains responsible for his daughter’s kidnapping, and leads the audience to the final Boss Round, the scene a large yacht where his virgin daughter is taken to her new wealthy Middle Eastern auction winner.

Aside from the fact that the movie ran more like a modern-day video game than a movie, without a complex plot, I found this movie to be highly disturbing for two reasons, neither of which are the obvious nature of the existence of human trafficking in the world.

One was the realization of our society’s oversaturation of indulgent stimuli and “entitlement gluttony,” that the entertainment industry demands stories that are actually mild versions of the harsh realities of life for many girls in third world countries, except that these girls don’t really have the benefit of being drugged because that would add additional expenses. Some are actually as young as six or seven years old. I couldn’t help but wonder – if this is what America is given for entertainment, what do people in those countries watch for entertainment (other than American films, probably not this one)? One certain thing is that this film was not shot in the same fashion as “Traffic” and other movies created in the dual interest of public education and Hollywood entertainment. No, this was pure thrill of the over-exaggerated reflexive skills of a former secret agent’s encounters with Eastern European gang members and the shock value of the dehumanization of young women in a censored and watered-down depiction of human sex trafficking, in its mildest form when compared with reality.

Two – the realization that this movie would have zero viewership potential and interests unless the main character victims of this human trafficking were Caucasian American young female tourists. As much as I would like to think that it would have the same effect to our audience if the girls were natives of these third-world Eastern European (or Latin American, African, Southeast Asian) countries, somehow I get a feeling that the shock value and the deliberate intent to stimulate the disturbance nerve within the American mass viewership would not sustain box office sales for a profit. Not to mention that it would be just a censored documentary and not a movie.

The question is , Why? Why have we morphed into a society where the harsh realities outside of our bubbles are then twisted into a way which resonates better with us and then sold to us as entertainment? And more importantly, since when have we been desensitized to basic human rights crimes, in a nation that invests millions in to advocacy for the rights of dogs, cats, retail interests, privacy, equal pay, universal healthcare, religion in schools, just to name a few? It’s not that we are ignorant of what goes on in the rest of the world – most people with a television and a computer are probably aware of “some kind of human trafficking out there.” It is that we know, but the story has to be offered to us on a skewed Hollywood-renditioned platter with a plot on top for it to trigger any kind of reaction or emotion (while still temporary during the two-hour show) out of us, and then the show is over – time to get back to real life.

Is it because we have all become greedy, lazy and slothful individuals? I think not. Many of us do give – we give our time, money, prayers and efforts to the protection of fundamental “rights” of others – from gay marriage to workers’ compensation to health care, property values, mortgage loans and education. Some of us are tirelessly working away at a new bill, resolution, organization, speech, campaign or other effort to influence others to understand and “open their eyes” to the realities of the need to preserve people’s entitlements, to respect others’ views and opinions, to accept and embrace diversity. Even when we are not in the demographic category of someone discriminated against, we are offended. We are offended for them, but we are also offended for us, for our society, and feel an urge to speak up so that we can keep each other honest.

But our society’s sensitivities to our entitlements have become so sophisticated, precise and advanced that we don’t recognize those harmed which should be far more offensive. We’ve evolved from human rights, to civil rights and now a society of advanced entitlements (on which we champion the American brand), that we have lost sight of the heart that brought us here. We are so upset that homosexuals are not treated the same as heterosexuals, minorities are not treated like majorities, my paycheck is not the same as your paycheck, you make more so you should pay more taxes, my health is not treated the same way your health is, social security, an embryo’s right to life, a woman’s right to choose, a patient’s right to a brand drug over a generic drug – we are dizzy in this society where we bask in the gluttony of entitlements, that the notion that there are humans who are not treated like humans is beyond our ability to fathom. This occasional disturbance is treated with a salve of differentiation – but this is America, we are different. We deserve more, and we deserve better. But it happens here, too. It just somehow slipped through the cracks amidst the noise of other passionately debated entitlements to our people.

As Christians, the message is even more disturbing. Because the confines of citizenship, geographic location, nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, race – none of these demographics can be made as an excuse to differentiate.

“If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land.”
2 Chron. 7:14 (NLT)

And I don’t even consider myself a human rights activist. I’m just a young professional Asian American married female, residing in my single family home in Orange County, California, with two Golden Retrievers, three cars and an online blog.