What do you know about human rights?
You study them in your philosophy classes, or debate them at the lunch table. You use them as a base for your morality, a point in an argument. You try to list them, rights, whether deriving them from the International Bill of rights, the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, or a religious texts like the bible. People try to make sense of the world through these words, letters on a page.
You spend long hours contemplating their nature, and their purpose, as if human rights are a mind game, some sort of rubix cube. Or you memorize them, a list of words that are meant to en-capsule all that is just in the world.
At the end of the semester, if you study human rights, or any other rights, you get a little letter that describes how much you know about these rights.
A
B
C
D
F
Proudly, you show off that coveted letter, "A," and you think you know what it means to study "Human Rights?"
You disgust me.
These are lives, human lives, that are at risk.
You say you know what human rights are, yet you've never been on the ground, you've never even talked to the people who are fighting for their lives right now!
Human rights is a serious subject, and you treat it like a game. Why do you study such subjects, as a tick to a resume, another point in your G.P.A?
People are dying.
Where were you when they needed you? When someone is asking you to join them in the fight, where the fuck are you? You say you're a student of human rights, but what the fuck are you doing? What difference have you actually made for anyone?
And you get away with it. Getting that little letter, you move on with your life. When people ask you about morality, you have a good bit to put into the conversation. They stand in awe of your intellect, impressed.
I'm not.
Human rights are the story of others pain, their very fight for survival. Intellectually, academically, we look at human rights, as if we know even an inch of what that means.
But do you know what it means to learn about human rights, emotionally, spiritually, to have it tied into your soul like the thread on a needle, embedded not by choice, but because there is no other choice but to fight?
Do you know what its like to have you fear for your life because of the color of your skin, or the clothes that you wear?
What it's like to have you land stolen from you, familly murdered in front of you?
To be forced to flee from your home, only to be rejected at every place you enter?
You know NOTHING about their struggle.
I know nothing about their struggle.
To pretend we know anything about human rights is simply hubris.
Don't ask me about human rights as if I could ever explain them to someone like you. They are more than a fucking list or rubix cube, more than a debate at lunch.
People's lives are at stake.
Until you can know this-No,
Until you can feel this, in your very soul, you are not worth talking to.
Don't talk to me about your political science or philosophy class, and pretend you know shit about human rights.
Don't talk to me about your vapid law, or your Locke and Rousseau, and sit high-handed, thinking you are morality squared away.
Leave your arrogance, and your ego behind.
The truth is, none of us know shit about human rights until we first learn compassion.
Until we first learn empathy.
Until we first know, feel and connect ourselves to each other beyond these shallow motions of intellectual connection, and hyper-rationalized reading of texts.
The lives and rights of fellow human is more than just an interesting debate
Compassion, radical love, humanity, soul.
We must first learn love, true, and all encompassing love, for each other. Love that transcends our differences, that transcends our daily lives and hearts, love that yearns for, that demands compassion.
Love so strong, it does not allow us to be immobile in the face of injustice.
Then, and only then, can we start having real conversations about human rights.
