Rights

Rights

by Marco M. Pardi

“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” St. Francis of Assisi

For the third time in a training session Tonio refused the Training Master’s directive that he put a spiked choke chain on his attack dog. “It’s just not necessary, and it breaks the trust between dog and handler that could have fatal results later.”

Hours later Tonio overheard the Training Master in a heated argument with the Unit NCOIC. The TM was arguing for Court-Martial charges; the NCOIC, tolerant to this point of the TM’s brutal training methods, refused and offered an alternative: a public competition in which 21 dogs and handlers would compete. The teams would have 21 days to prepare and Tonio would be allowed to employ his own methods of training and working with his dog.

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In this era of thoroughly outrageous health care costs a common saying has emerged: Health care is a human right. Admittedly, that’s a catchy saying and fits nicely on a bumper sticker. But I pay close attention to words, and especially to the concepts they are used to transmit. In this case the predicate seems to be that humans, simply by being human, have certain universal and undeniable rights. Who decided that? Non-humans? Oh, of course, we awarded ourselves that, along with preeminence over everything else in existence.

The pronouncement of health care as a human right may flow, though I doubt it, from the following: “Everyone has a 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 the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS. United Nations Article 25.1 10 December 1948.

I said above that I doubt this is the predicate of health care is a human right simply because I think most people are only dimly aware of the United Nations, much less what the U.N. has to say. Nonetheless, no matter who states it, the challenge remains: On what basis do humans claim rights for themselves?

Moments before Tonio took the oath swearing him into the military he was informed that in so doing he would surrender his rights under the U.S. Constitution and would henceforth come under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Furthermore, he was made aware that what rights he would have did not come free. As Samuel Coleridge said, “There are no rights without corresponding duties”. But Tonio, being a quietly independent soul, may have been listening in his mind to Robert Frost, who said, “I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way”. (When unwanted telephone calls come to me I just tell the caller to go and engage in a certain auto-erotic behavior.) My phone, my right.

Americans, by acquiescing to the daily destruction of their rights as citizens, seem to be heeding Frost in a perverse way. To the extent they have come to believe the way of the regime now in power is in fact their own way, they are marching in lockstep into the hell of Fascism. Please look back at that Universal Declaration of Human Rights above and ask yourself how the billions of dollars poured into the Pentagon, into the border monument to Trump, into the tax breaks to the planet killing fossil fuel industry, the move to abolish the Consumer Protection Agency and limit the right to sue manufacturers for damages, the reduction or elimination of social support such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), the usurpation of power from the Legislative and the judicial branches of government to the Executive branch, the closure of dozens of rural hospitals in States that refuse to accept MedicAid expansion, and the de-funding of scientific programs not helpful to or in contradiction of the military-industrial complex honor and serve the “human rights” so confidently listed.

For many years I have been a strong supporter of several organizations that protect, rescue, rehabilitate, and/or provide homes for non-human animals. One of these, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is winning expensive court cases in favor of recognizing the inherent sentience, and therefore rights, of a variety of nonhuman animals. How strange it must be to courts and observers that serious, competent attorneys plead cases on behalf of captive elephants, chimpanzees, and other nonhuman animals kept in miserable confinement for the passing entertainment of a few shallow humans. No one is asking that these nonhumans be enfranchised with voting privileges; we ask only that they be freed from their tortuous captivity and allowed to live out their lives in certified sanctuaries. (For the record, I also support the sanctuaries). I also support organizations with a broader scope, such as Earthrights International. What? Rocks have rights? The formative philosophy is that Earth is a cohesive whole, not an amalgam of separate parts. As such, its presence gives it validity. And, its validity gives it rights.

I often hear the phrase, “God given rights”. Whose God? And what of those people who do not believe in a God for which there is no evidence? Do the believers have the right to smite the unbelievers? (I like that word smite. It’s so kinetic. A physicist would call it elegant.)

But again, no matter where we look, we have no factual basis for the concept of Rights as it is applied solely to humans. The claim that humans were created by a God is interesting, but must take into account that, according to the belief, so was everything else. Ah, but we are told that this God “breathed” a spark of divinity into humans, but not into anything else. Really? Who says so?

Since we have elevated ourselves above every other form of existence we are asked to reach down to the nonhuman animals and to exercise compassion toward them. Noblesse oblige. How very wonderful of us. But Mankind has long demonstrated that compassion, even decency, takes a very distant back seat to money and pleasure.

Some people flippantly state that Might Makes Right. In very specific and short-term settings there may be some truth to that. However, those people would be wise to remember the saying, Those who live by the sword die by the sword. The new corona-virus now rapidly spreading over all but one of the seven continents may prove mightier than Man’s ability to defeat it. Does its Might give it the Right?