Oh man, I hate that I’m starting to sound like The Grinch Who Stole Awareness in threads like these, especially as I work in communications, but - cool remixes not withstanding - I can’t help but feel that “awareness” has become a latter-day conscience balm. We use it as a salve to excuse the comfortable, inescapable hypocrisy of (modern?) life. I feel like stuff like this represents a horrible nadir of consumerism and identity politics - where individual choices and individual actions matter most of all, a kind of hyper-real where believing or feeling something is as real as doing something. The arrogant, simplistic and crushingly naive preamble to the website only confirms this for me. (Slavery is real. This site is a for inspiring all minds to take a moment to consider that as long as we live in a world where slavery is permitted, no one is free. This site is meant to serve as a beacon to all those who want to help end slavery in our world today. This is a place to engage and use your voice right now to change history. ) Posting on Facebook how much you hate slavery is not action. Some dude in Mali neither knows nor gives a fuck that you wrote a song about how bad slavery is. Neither does the pimp in Houston.
