Saturday, January 14, 2012

Congratulations on Captaining That Ship Filled With Human Cargo!


Human trafficking isn't for everyone. A lot of people get into it because they're big old rapists, and a lot of other people get into it because they're friends with big old rapists but just don't know how to say no. You got into it because your daddy left you when you were just a boy and you didn't know no other way. Warn't your fault that folk couldn't understand a boy from the Balkans wanting to be something more, and it certainly warn't your fault that the only job you could find out of Balkan college happened to be running guns with mercenaries.

From there it was just a quick skip and a hop to human trafficking.

At first you just did it in trucks and vans, bringing a handful of refugees across the border at a time. They were almost always women, young, pretty women. You never asked where they were coming from or where they were going. Occasionally you'd move someone unusual through, a man or an elderly person. Sometimes you'd move children through: you'd always ask about them. A man has to have some principles.

After a few years of doing that, though, it just got old. So you decided to move on to bigger, better things. You saved up your pennies or rubles or whatever they use for money in that shithole you call a country and you bought a boat.

It wasn't a big boat - it was a sixty foot fishing boat, retrofitted to function as a small cargo ship. You decided to fill it up with people and set sail.

Your maiden voyage is going to be tonight (cops take the weekend off in your country, which makes your job super easy) and it's going to go swimmingly. No one is going to die or make trouble, which means you'll get all the money you thought you were going to get for the run: enough to pay for the ship and still have plenty to divvy up among your crew.

Also, you'll have customers who aren't just pervy old men trafficking in women and mobsters trying to get their family members out of the way of the law after committing murder or whatever. You'll have mostly moved families attempting to avoid one of your many festive genocides out of the country. And you'll have moved them into Turkey, a country with even looser borders than your own, and far fewer genocides of late.

So you'll feel good about being you, and you'll have launched a lucrative business venture that makes you, more or less, your own boss.

Congratulations on Captaining That Ship Filled With Human Cargo!

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