I am glad to see that there are so many people that know that human rights is not what we fought for at one time and is now over and done with, but a very real battle we are fighting right now.
What scares me though, is what gets shot in the crossfire.
What is a human right? No, I don't mean what is a right and what is a luxury. I mean what rights do people themselves want, and what opinions are touted as rights (usually accompanied by an out of context picture of a "poor oppressed person") by people who honestly think they are helping, because they imagine if they were that person, they would want that right. Sometimes our imaginations are more limited to our own experiences than we would like to believe.
I am not talking about not giving a lady the "right" to show her hair if she doesn't want to. Whether this is the most pressing civil right may be questionable, but having the right to choose to cover her hair, instead of being forced to, is actually very much a human right.
What I am talking about is people rallying for a cause that would say it was "giving her the right not to cover her hair" but in reality was forcibly taking away her hair covering. When people (I'm quite sure unintentionally, and only through misunderstanding of culture) take a persons right to choose away and call it giving them the right to do the opposite of what they were doing. We see it all the time in this country with children and education. Having the "right" to something means being able to choose, NOT being forced to do what another thinks is good for you or will make you happy. Can you imagine if we treated the right to religion the same way we treat the right of a child to an education?
I was living for some time in a country where the tradition was for the oldest children in the family to not get married and just work their whole lives in order to put the younger children through school and so the younger children could have lives and get out of the slums. Many people may see this as horrible that the older children are practically slaves their whole lives, and give up having a life. Many other people see this as sweet that a family is so close together that they will sacrifice their whole lives for each other to progress as an extended family (perhaps like wolves). What "many people" think is not important. What is important is what those who CHOOSE to do this, think. Freeing them from it, by throwing away their culture and making decisions for them (because we white Americans are so much better at making decisions than anybody else in the rest of the world), is not fighting for human rights. It is fighting against them. (Obviously, ideally, supplying them with what they would need in order for everybody in the family to get an education if they wanted to and live life unchained by working their whole lives for the family, would be a way to free up their choices without pushing our perhaps selfish culture down their throats. - though perhaps they enjoy having the chance to serve close family - perhaps we are the ones missing out on this "right" if we don't have extended family members who desperately need us to give up our dreams for them.)
Autism is another easy example. Seeing someone with Autism, feeling sorry for them, and deciding that it is a "right" to not have Autism, is a very kind thing to do. It is not a very good way to fight for a persons "rights" though. What if the person with Autism felt the same sympathy for people without Autism. (Oh, ya, I forgot, they couldn't, because what people with Autism feel is unconsequential - they have Autism after all!)
Nothing like putting pictures of people who are unaware of or don't agree with a cause, on billboards to raise sympathetic money in order to do research to test and exterminate those kind of people in utero. (Sadly, many, many kind people unwittingly help society "cure" Autism.)
It's funny, as long as we are fighting for rights for ourselves, we seem to do O.K., even when we are fighting for rights for people we truly know and understand as equals. But when we fight for rights for people that we unwittingly think of as less capable of making decisions as ourselves (people from "developing" - lol - countries, people with "handicaps", and children) we, as a whole, suddenly stop fighting for the rights of freedom for these people, and simply fight for the rights of us being able to be the ones to force them to do what WE think is good for them, instead of somebody else getting to force them to do what they think is good for them. It's doubly sad because it is all out of kindness. Do you really think that everybody that votes for truancy laws hates children and wants to take their free agency away? No, they simply are led to believe that they are "helping" the incapable-of-making-their-own-decisions children who would "gasp" choose something else otherwise!
In some states it is legal to unbuckle your newborn and put them between you and the steering wheel (complete with lethal airbag that will explode if you have even just a fender bender), and nurse them while driving. In some states it is legal to spank your kid as many times as you want as long as it is on their bottom. Would forcibly taking children from homes where parents did these things, be fighting for civil rights? Would it be fighting for freedom? If you don't have a choice is it supporting your rights? If the child would rather stay with their mother and be spanked 10 times a day, is it supporting THEIR rights to force them to do otherwise? Whose rights are we talking about when we say "civil rights"?
The sign language symbol for help is a fist with the thumb sticking up. The other hand is held palm up and open and pushes against the bottom of the fist. Every time I see this, I remember that help is really only help when it is directed by the person being helped.
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