droititis

Human rights are a sham. They are sham(e)ful. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but the baby has begun to stink with the bathwater (probably because this system has drowned in itself). Rights are unsubstantial -- and most certainly not synonymous -- to compassion, co-in-passion. They are impersonal (instead of interpersonal), as that they leave movements -- being moved, moving toward, moving someone to... -- to the heart of the reader and the main resources for action to the individual in question. Heart in one and action in the other -- a dissonance between movements. Rights are semiotically discontinuous triadic complexes. Human rights respected (read 'allotted') by authorities and governments are not signs of love or care; they are mostly quotas of space to satisfy watchdog Judges. Rights to bear arms or vote are not naturally innate qualities we come recognize (Locke's God is dead if no other God isn't); rights are plots of territory given to (or at times taken away from) stewards by more powerful lords, an abstract sociopolitical fiefdom. My right to know or to express myself is the subject to an empty predicate of equally empty entitlement to discourse, private or public, "with limits." Boundaries to property; fences in a forest. Lines drawn on shifting plates of magma and temporary sediments. And you say, animals have rights now too? And rocks maybe?

Don't respect my rights. Open your ears to my words and your eyes to my gestures, my face. Be moved, or at least give me the opportunity to move you. Opportunities, not ordinances. Experience me. Love me. I do you. And you, and you. Yes and yes. No, not by default. Not because you resemble a human being; nor because you or I deserve it. Just because I know who I am (in theory) and I know who you are (in theory), and because the beginning of this sentence is a redundancy (in application). Opportunities, not ordinances. Compassion and crescendo, not credences (with bread and wine). Movements, not immunities.

If you want governments to respect and care about their people, don't throw human rights in their Face. The Christian God of the United States built the world in seven days and offers to save you; the Face of China was built by the hands of the people over millenia, and it means the world to them to save it. Both God and the Face have forgotten the people now, though; neither is as strong as the new ziggurat of the capitalist market. But remind them of their roots (after you learn them yourself); be radical (radicle) with Confucianism. Who knows -- maybe we'll learn how to revive our own inner Lazarus in the process, to see that building heaven on Earth means Creating out of love of the other (l'autre, tout autre), and does not entail justifying ourselves while waiting for the "end of days" (only Christians are convinced that the messiah has come already and is coming back now) with the notion that our neighbor had the right to choose between heaven and hell. "What Wills the Justice Deparment" is warn on everyone's wrists (of the right hand), when we should maybe be asking What Would Jesus Deliver? -- to all, not the few.

Or...reflecting and taking with us the important lessons of these antiquated systems of thought, perhaps we should face this time of closure of a sort. Maybe we should finally throw out the dead baby with the stale grail water. A change of system design over system improvement.

Whatever we do, we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them. It isn't right.