This is a call. This is shout at the top of your lungs in huge room with speakers blaring. This is not a two-sided issue. Not separated into right and left, but into the free – and the other 27 million.

Let that number sink in: 27 million. Don’t try to imagine it; you can’t. But 27 million is the number of people still enslaved in the world today. This is more than there have been at any time in this history of the entire world. Yes, there are more slaves today than any time in our history. According to iAbolish, www.iabolish.com, there are slaves – people forced to labor without pay under the threat of violence – in every country on every continent, from Sudan to Thailand to the United States.

This is a fight. This is a brawl with the biggest kid in fifth grade when you were still in second. This fight can’t be fought unless we know and understand. Before reading in this column that there are 27 million people still enslaved, did you have any idea? We can work together to end hunger, fight AIDS and conquer poverty. All those issues are well-known, but slavery, an issue of freedom, of the basic human right of free thought and individuality and choice, is not. It is time for us to join together and help free the captive.

This is reality. This is no bug-eating, island-voting-off, average-Joe-marrying reality. Slavery is real, and it is happening all the time.

Most of us are familiar with chattel slavery, the type of slavery we learned about in school, where a group of people (usually a certain religion or race) is captured and sent to be slaves somewhere else. This type of slavery is most common still in African nations. In Sudan, the northern Arabs attack the southern Christian blacks and take them back north, where they become slaves and may be sent to other countries as well.

Sex slavery is another major form. In Thailand, children as young as 10 are forced to have sex with Western tourists and are never allowed to leave their brothel. During the past five years, child sex tourism has increased 750 percent, according to the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes-USA organization’s website, www.ecpatusa.org.

Another form of slavery is debt bondage. This type occurs when a person becomes a slave for someone in hopes of paying off a debt that is continuously increasing and will never be paid off. Their children then inherit the debt and are born into slavery.

Even here in the United States, there is slavery. People are promised wealth and good jobs only to wind up as a forced slave in the home of anyone from doctors to diplomats.

This is a challenge. This is a game against Duke when Ekene Ibekwe, James Gist, Chris McCray and Travis Garrison all have the flu. Right now there is a book up for consideration as next year’s first-year book. It was written by Francis Bok, an escaped slave from Sudan. He was a slave from 1986 to 1996 before he finally escaped. From the age of 7 to 17, he slept with the animals and ate leftover rotten meat. He saw people in his village killed in front of him. He lived a life that cannot be described by anyone other than the man that lived – nay, survived – that life.

If his book were to be chosen as the first-year book, it would provide the starting point we need to make a change. It would provide the knowledge, the awareness of the issue. I am asking anyone on the committee that chooses the book to heavily consider Bok’s Escape from Slavery.

This is a hope. This is the kind of “pray as hard as you can the day of that exam you forgot about” hope. My last call is to those who want to do more than just know, that want to help make a change. If you are interested in helping to form an anti-slavery group on the campus or would just like more information on modern day slavery, please e-mail me at philm613@comcast.net. Thank you.

Philip McCauley is a freshman engineering major. He can be reached at philm613@comcast.net.