TRANSCRIPT
Although I am an ardent defender of human rights, sometimes what gets labeled as human rights, especially the human rights of adults, can seem a bit ridiculous to me. Recently, I was reading the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights. I believe that’s what it’s called, and it troubled me. I was reading this, and I was thinking it kind of felt false to me. It didn’t really feel correct, and I actually didn’t agree with quite a few of the things that they said there that they labeled as universal human rights.
So I would like to read some of those things that really I didn’t quite agree with, and I would like to talk after that about why I think they were false and what real actual human rights are that were actually left off this list. So let me read something. I copied and pasted some of these. Let’s bring up my computer for one second.
So from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I excised some of these things that I didn’t quite agree with:
- Everyone has the right to work and to protection against unemployment.
- Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration, ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
- Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
- Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services.
- And finally, this one really jumped out at me: the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.
Well, let me take my glasses off so I can focus a little bit better. Why did I not agree with those? Not saying that those are things that people don’t want. I certainly want a lot of those things, and I like a lot of those things. But are those my rights? Do I have a right to be protected by a government if I don’t have enough money? Do I have to have a government that gives me clothing and housing and medical care and insurance if I lose my job? Is that a fundamental right of mine? I actually kind of question that.
And the reason that I question that is I think that puts the government, or any government, or the world, some big organization, in the position of being the parent. And suddenly, I’m a child who can’t take care of myself and need someone who’s going to look after me and nurture me. For me, I feel those are my responsibilities—doing those kind of things if I can earn them and work for them and create them, prepare ahead in my future for problems that I might have. It’s my job to do a lot of those things.
And I felt the idea that those are a right of mine, that I’m supposed to be given these things, that I’m entitled to these things. I hear a lot of people in our modern world, in America and other countries, talking about their entitlements. And yet, I’ve been in other places in the world where people don’t agree that those are fundamental human rights and that they have to work for them and they have to fight for them. A lot of times, what I’ve seen in places like that is that people have more self-esteem. They have more of a sense of responsibility. They have to work to earn things. They’re not just being given things.
I think a lot of times when people are just given, given, given things that they didn’t work for or fight for or sacrifice for or struggle for, they become soft inside. But more so, they lose their sense of being empowered. A lot of times, people don’t say that. They say, “Oh, it’s the responsibility of the world, the government, whatever it is, to empower me.” But I don’t believe that. I believe it comes from the inside.
But this isn’t really even what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about at a deeper level are the human rights that were left off this list, and there were a lot. I’ve talked about this in varying ways in other videos, but I think the real area of human rights that’s so profoundly neglected by the United Nations, it’s ignored by governments, it’s ignored by the media, it’s ignored by most people, it’s ignored by this fundamental unit of society, the family system. And that is the right of the child—the different inalienable rights of the child.
To have emotionally healthy parents, psychologically healthy parents. To grow up in a world that is safe and free, where the child can go outside and play without having to worry about being hurt or attacked. A world where a child can make friends, can choose friends, can have lots of different people to choose from. To grow up in a family that doesn’t have so many kids that the child is just inherently neglected by the parents because the parents don’t have the energy to be able to focus on the child.
A world where the child has lots and lots of time to spend with his or her parents, where his parents aren’t always away working and giving him to nannies and babysitters and schools to take the responsibility. The right of the child to have parents who really develop a strong, nurturing, caring bond with that child, where the child can have parents as role models—people who they look up to, people who are mature and healthy, who will guide that child.
I also think a child has a right to have access to nature—healthy nature, not polluted nature. A world to have access to plants and animals, access to the wilderness, access to explore this wilderness in a safe and healthy way. Access to be alone in nature when they’re old enough to be able to handle that. And I think often children, when they’re very young, can begin to explore nature alone in a healthy way.
The child has a right to boundaries. The child has a right to not be violated by his or her parents. I know this is that our society says the parents cannot violate the child physically or sexually, but even those things go on all the time in all sorts of subtle ways that society actually will end up defending the parents over. And who enforces these human rights? Who says that it’s not okay for parents to violate their children’s human rights? Who says that it’s not okay for parents to bring up their children in a world of war and deprivation and horror? Who says it’s okay for parents to have children when the parents themselves are sick and ill, when the parents don’t have enough money to support the child?
Why is that the government’s responsibility? Isn’t it the responsibility of the parents to not have children when they know they will not be able to fulfill their children’s human rights? So that really comes to my mind. I think a lot of times what happens when we define these United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that people and society displace the unmet needs, the unfulfilled rights of the child, and they displace it onto adults.
Basically, what happens is they don’t even talk about all the different ways in which parents failed children, and instead, they make it out suddenly like it is the responsibility of governments of the world to treat adults like the children that they once were and then meet their needs. But to me, that is so misplaced, and also it’s a massive waste of energy. You really want to have a healthier world? What we need is to meet the needs of the children, respect the actual fundamental rights of the child to help them grow up and develop into mature, non-traumatized individuals. And then we won’t have to worry about all these sort of extraneous and often stupid and misplaced rights that we call human rights of adults.