Addiction

I wish people would stop running up the stairs in my stairwell. It makes me nervous. Every time I hear that sound, I half-expect someone to come barging into my room, where they would find me laying stomach-down on my bed typing on my computer listening to The Weepies, with Comedy Central on mute.

People are disgusting. I have a hard time making "I would never" statements, but one thing I know for SURE I would never do is let my self-interest affect the well-being of another person. I would never let my addiction consume me to the point that I resorted to violence or degradation of an individual who had nothing to do with my problems. I was looking at the Shared Hope International website today. It's an organization that helps rescue victims of the child sex slave industry and prevent the advancement of sex trafficking. Smut attracts the darkest side of people's desires, and it's frightening what people will do under the guise of anonymity. Trading children for sex is one of the most disgusting manifestations of human self-interest. When someone is so morally vacant that they allow themselves to pimp 14-year-old children to adult men who will have sex with them repeatedly until their digestive organs begin to fail, something is seriously wrong with humanity. The issue is much bigger and more widespread than people think. Here are just a few statistics from CrisisAid.org:

- 1.2 million children are trafficked every year.
- The average age of a traffic victim is 14.
- The average victim is forced to have sex up to 40 times a day.
- Between 14,500 and 17,500 victims are trafficked into the United States each year.
- Sex trafficking is the number one crime worldwide.

Sex is dangerously universal, and it sells everywhere, no matter who you are or where you're from. Everywhere people are looking for a fix. I'd put heroine addicts one rung above buyers of child prostitution on the ladder of human depravity. Sticking a needle in your arm only directly harms the YOU. Of course, it's not even practical to make a "lesser of two evils" statement like that, because all addiction inherently harms someone other than the addict.

In the end, individual conflict between doing what's right and what feels good will never be fully resolved. I think that's a big part of the human experience--finding balance between your own desires and the will to do good for others.

Most people, I think, would be surprised to know just how strong they really are in the fight against their addictions. I'm a firm believer in the notion that, if you can will it, you can do it. I guess you could call it mind over matter. God doesn't give us challenges that we aren't able to overcome in some way. In regards to overcoming the ugliest parts of who we are and denying that which marks the human race as morally corrupt and bankrupt on conscience, Whitney Houston said it best: "I was not built to break... I didn't know my own strength."