Yesterday I was able to complete all of my training videos for work. They released them earlier this year so that we wouldn’t have to do them in August when we should be setting up our classrooms and getting our offices together. These videos don’t change. You have your sexual harassment video, bloodborne pathogens, bullying, suicide, diabetes, seizures, and all of those videos. This is important stuff, but the videos are the same every year. So, you put it on in the background and wait for the short quiz at the end where you already know all of the answers.

They added a new video this year. It may have been there before, but this one was twice as long as all of the others. It was about human trafficking. Immediately, my mind went to a conversation that I had with one of my wife’s family members. He has been taken in by the Q folks and it was all too predictable. He fits the demographic perfectly. He’s struggling economically. He’s undereducated and he has a whole host of personal problems. Yet, here he was rambling on about human trafficking.

So, I stopped him and asked him if he knew anyone that had been trafficked. He said no. Then I asked him if he knew anyone that knew anyone that had been trafficked. He said no. However, before I could finish the obvious point I was making, he went on to tell me how he had been abused as a child. I didn’t know him as a child. There is no way I could verify his story. In fact, my wife couldn’t verify it. I suspect it was a crutch to explain his personal failures but I certainly couldn’t react that way. So, I expressed an appropriate level of concern and condolences and the conversation ended.

That’s ultimately the goal in these situations. I call it the conservative cover charge. Whether it’s migrants dying in the back of a van, faceless kids involved in human trafficking, and potential babies being aborted by “thoughtless” liberals, there is a cover charge for entering the conversation. You must express the requisite level of concern or you won’t be invited to continue with the conversation. You take your two drinks and leave. They certainly don’t want a conversation about who exactly is being trafficked, why they are being trafficked, and what could actually be done to curb it.

My wife told me another tale about how men at her university decided they were going to form a new group to pick up chicks. The group would be called “Men Against Rape.” It would somehow impress girls because they are sensitive. It obviously didn’t work because the vast majority saw through the whole thing. After all, how many points do you get for announcing that you are against something that no sane person could actually say they are for?

This isn’t to say that rape isn’t a problem. It isn’t to say that human trafficking isn’t a problem. Yet, this is a part of that cover charge. We have to come out and say something that should be obvious to all functioning adults and most children. The problem is that we say it’s a problem and then sit back and throw up our hands. No one wants to talk about how big (or small) the problem actually is and things we can do to actually stop it. No, that would take actual brain power.

No one is being abducted from the HEB parking lot right in front of their family. Very few if any are being abducted on their way home from school. The thought of a trafficker allowing someone they are trafficking to actually come to school is laughable. Having us watch a 60 minute video in case one in ten thousand actually comes to school is a testament to how much of a hold Q has on this whole society. These kids definitely exist, but they aren’t going to school or being abducted in broad daylight. They aren’t being held by Hillary, Democrats, or Tom Hanks. These things are always more seedy and tragically real than that. Yet, that doesn’t fit in a 60 minute video.