英文自修33：扭头不看，还是迎接挑战？
Thought for the Day 20140303
Rev Professor David Wilkinson
Last night, 12 years a slave won the Oscar for best picture, recognising 认可 Steve McQueen’s skilful adaptation 改编 of Solomon Northup’s own story. Its enduring 持久的 value is that it gives an uncomfortable insight 令人不快的真知 into human trafficking 拐卖人口, detailing 详述 the history and raising the issue for today 而今重提此事.
Northup wrote about his abduction 诱拐 and consequent struggle 随后的斗争 to both survive and live during his time as a slave. It explores complex themes from religion to the brutalisation of victims 对受害者的狂暴侵害. It shows how plantation owners used biblical texts to justify oppression 为压迫行为辩护, while a Canadian abolitionist 废奴主义者, convinced 坚信 that all are made in the image of God, plays a key role in helping Northop’s release. Contemporary 当代的 black theologian James Cone points out that many victims of slavery found that their faith gave them courage to survive, resist and hope. However, Cone calls racism America’s ‘original sin’ 原罪, where sin is not only what you do but also your inability to see it此罪既指人们所作所为，也指其无力洞见之.
Northop himself sympathetically characterises 描绘 his owner William Ford as a kind, noble Christian, but then writes, ‘The influences 对他有影响的人 and associations 他的关系人士 that had always surrounded him, blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery令他对奴隶制度最深刻的内在错误视而不见’.
It is so easy to be blinded to the inherent wrong, whether through economic ambition 经济发展的雄心（指园主发展种植园需要大量廉价劳力）, religious prejudice 宗教偏见 or selfishness. This means that changing the world is a huge struggle. At the start of his parliamentary campaign 国会选战, Wilberforce, in concluding his three hour speech detailing the facts of slavery, said, ‘Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way 选择扭头避开 but you can never again say that you did not know.’ Yet the combination of blindness and wilful ignorance 有意的无视 meant that it needed 20 more years to abolish the slave trade and then decades to root it根除out of North America.
The work still needs to go on. In the past week, the Joint Commons and Lords Committee 上下院联合委员会（英国议会） on the Draft Modern Slavery Bill 现代奴隶法案草案 has been receiving evidence 接受证据/证词. There are more than 20 million adults and children forced into 被强卖为 slavery worldwide, and Home office figures 数字 show that there is a sharp rise in human trafficking here in the UK with victims from Albania, Nigeria and Vietnam.
The Slavery Bill is needed so that businesses have transparent 透明的 supply chains but also that victims are supported, defended and freed. 12 years a slave is not just a brilliant movie, nor an important social history, it is the story of a victim – one among many, many victims – that challenges me not to look the other way 对我提出挑战，不能扭头不看.