She fit perfectly the description that George W. Bush gave of his countrymen in his second acceptance speech:

“… sturdy and honest, and hopeful as the break of day.”

With innocent delight she told me about her wonderful luck in business. She and her husband lived in Florida; they owned a furniture factory in the Caribbean which earned them extraordinary amounts of money. They were very rich. God had guided and protected them all the way.

…

“It’s amazing!” she marvelled. “We are so blessed! You know, we hardly have to pay the workers anything!”

It seems that, like the powerful all through history, we in the prosperous West have been blind to the most fundamental of truths: that all human beings truly are of equal worth. Without this knowledge rooted in blood and sinew and bone, we’ve taken it for granted that somehow, we matter more than the rest.

So we’ve fallen into what is, in fact, exploitation