Ok lets take a vote-there is a way to set up voting on blogs, I will have to figure this out later..but talk about upsetting. ..
We were having a blast at the San Geronimo fest, walking through blocks and blocks of non-stop fun, then we turned and came upon a 19th century freak show booth-maybe I am naive or just a HUMAN being, but I though those were outlawed over one hundred years ago. OK actually I just wikipediaed it: “Today, freak shows are outlawed in a number of U.S. states,” I guess I am not soo extreme.
So there was this booth as you can see in the picture and an audio track announcing “Little Thumbelina, a real live woman, two feet tall, smallest woman alive, little Thumbelina” And I was like “Ok Mike they did not just say this, it’s probably a scam to get everyone’s buck and its probably like a little doll.”
So I had to go in, NOT to gawk at the smallest woman alive but to really see if in this day and age in, what ppl call the “center of the world,” New York city, where there is a huge concentration of non-profits and human rights groups, if right here in front of my eyes this could be real-that it could be acceptable to exploit a woman’s deformity/disability in this way.
So I gave this Caribbean man my dollar bill and walked behind the booth to find indeed a two foot tall woman sitting on a little chair propped up on a platform like a display. Wow it was unbelievable; it was true. I stopped and said, “Do you travel around doing this, do they think this is really ok, is this ok to you?” And she pointed to a sign that read, “ I am from the Caribbean and speak only a little bit of English.” Soon after I walked right back to the man collecting the money and said, “Are you her friend, do you think this is ok to exploit this woman in this way.” I wanted to go back in and take a photograph to somehow expose something that as the police later told me was “ a New York norm” and the man said “no my boss could fire us.” So I sent Mike back in with a scripture that I had happened to have in my pocket.
Wow…Even if that woman is ok with that, I mean she is there and she probably does make a ton of money, is it ok? How many of us have friends and family who do things that they choose to do but that is damaging to their body, mind, soul etc…All I can say is that is not ok-it is never ok to exploit a human being.
