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Human Rights
Human Rights in the New
Millennium by Maria Cristina Azcona 1. SOCIETY ILLNESS: Postmodern times are already installed in our lives. Automation is here, with its universe of light blue and yellow wires surrounding us like satellites. The Internet constructs fantastic buildings of free and quick communications between anybody anywhere. New scientific methods, beyond the most psychotic imagination are capable nowadays of incredible effects like transplant of organs. Let us think about cloning, plastic surgery and other astonishing possibilities. Science has definitely been directed towards an annoying technical perfection. But, where is the rule, the limit to all these novelties? Who cares about the substantial victims of this advancement? Human life is not considered today as a principal theme compared to the sight of a beautiful shinny surface of a space shuttle initiating its new adventure towards the ending of times. An ill humanity is one to whom life is not sufficiently important to stop pollution, because pollution is produced by substances that we need for commercial purposes. We work, love and play in a sick civilization where values are only words, but blood is spread every minute and in every country like tomato sauce. Can we perceive any difference between the shocks on TV images? Sometimes we are not able to say if they are real or fictitious. Furthermore, we are so accustomed to the daily news that war seems not substantially gruesome when it takes place. If the conflagration is at home, or connected to it, and generates a dreadful crisis everywhere we go, then we react with a sort of paradoxical amazement. There is a lack of compromise in reference to the victims of social injustice, anywhere. We are not learned or prepared to make any movement that could possibly change an infinitesimal part of those torments. The lack of response is born from a consensus on a widespread idea:
Naturally, there are international forums where debates take place among specialists, and they should have the power to decide and solve all problems that we face – disasters, wars, poverty. International organizations for the defense of human rights are not owners of the decisions. For the moment, though they only enunciate and make considerations and admonitions, rather than exert force judiciously, as no country on earth is motivated to give them that much power. Is it time enough to revamp these conventions about human rights in this Third Millennium? Yes. These organizations make annual or biannual meetings and declarations are proclaimed, but, in general, the nations do not listen very carefully to their advice. There are different rhythms, different timings if we compare the process of those honorable assemblies and the burning urgencies of political matters. Time is a tyrant, we say, but nobody worries on the time we are loosing while humanity goes faster and faster towards its own devastation. Each nation must use its eyes and see what is happening to this blue illusion, to this green, green valley, our universal home. If we consider Earth as our home and Humanity as our family, we will be able to consider the panorama of the worldwide situation. There are two aspects to be thought about:
There are two kinds of discourses. One is made in the first level, the BE level. The other is made in the second level, the OUGHT TO BE level. Morality is in general left to one side. Nevertheless, it is named and renamed. How many crimes there have been in the name of Goodness? 2. THE SOCIAL VICTIMS:
The list is interminable. Paradoxically, globalization is a great progress in the sense of technique, but progress is not global in the sense of equal opportunities. Mass media progress allows us to take notice of people suffering in other places. And their beseeching eyes deeply dig into our hearts. Their right to study, to be well fed or to be protected from brutality is truthfully denied to them. There are children growing with envy of other children. They also see in their TV screens, because of progress, how others can enjoy life, while they are submerged into the hollow of times. They call for justice but no one answers, and without any future at sight they conceal their dissatisfaction under the mask of unbelievable philosophies full of Evil. Of course, they don’t have the right to transform their frustration into violence, but it has occurred in front of our eyes. There is an entire generation that hate progress because they blame it on their unhappiness. Ignorance is the mother of Brutality and Frustration is mother of Hate. So, how can we be secure if people are frustrated everywhere? There must be a way out of this situation. Society should recognize values like Goodness, Justice, Honesty, Integrity, Truth, Honor and Heroism. Educational systems must incorporate these values or be revamped to include them so as to help society change. Overhauled laws, updated ideas, and a new concept of social justice could be studied. This is the era of selfishness and consumerism. Nowadays, the young people especially have fallen prey to the self-centered ideology of fashion and fads that the global media is pushing. No more the innocence of noisy kids owning neighborhoods. Everyone, is occupied in his or her own desperation. Parents have no clue what the kids are doing, or for that matter what the other is doing. Panic attack is the modern name to the Nausea of Sartre’s Existentialism. "I have the right to be happy," says a man, and goes far away from his wife and five children. Then, when these children grow full of hate and finish their travel in the drug paradise, their father will say: "What happened? I am surprised!" Individualism is the most direct route to depression. Consuming passion is no other thing than eating the bread of someone else before he notices. Teresa de Calcutta once said: "Do not invite me to dinner. With one hundred dollars I can feed a person for a month." Tragic times are these, and they are, in a roundabout way, the result of human rights depreciation. These circumstances are somehow connected with heartless superficiality of the generation of the Third Millennium. They are not producers of the phenomenon but surely they are not helping to solve the dilemma. 3. THE CHILDREN RIGHTS a. Starvation & Poverty In this era, we are arriving at an awful suspicion: that there will not be enough food and water to maintain an exploding population. In front of our eyes, starvation is killing hundreds and even thousands. Their right to live begins in their right to eat. Corruption is installed in the government of their countries. The population sometimes do not hear or see anything. Citizens walk at their side without a single word. The lattice of inconsiderateness hurts more than the knife of hunger. Shamelessly, there are not many corporations taking the compromise to effectively save a particular starving child. b. Post-modern Family: Certainly, no one is concerned enough in these days about a child’s right to live with both parents. In opposition, everybody cares about their own right to do whatever they want. The Postmodern family is a new model of family where the kids are without a stable home. Is a very amusing way of living? Not so to these transient boys and girls who move from one parent to another. Family is the basic cell of society. So, what will happen to a society more than half of the children are born "outside" and live outside the family? We learned to respect values into a traditional model of family, where each person had a different role and a specific responsibility. There is a profound crisis when such role models are absent. If today’s family is a challenge what will the family of the future look like? c. Child abuse: Children are the seed of the future, but we are destroying their growth from the very moment we denied to accept their lack of opportunities as our own fault. All Earth habitants have a compromise with them. We are the silenced witnesses of abuse. I’m not just talking about child pornographic. Abuse is also made when a child is working in the streets under our eyes, and we do not dare to help him. His eyes accuse every adult who is not giving him the opportunity to grow. Let us see him condemned to be a slave of the Third Millennium, because of his acquired poverty. 4. INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS Society is worried on material matters, based in economical patterns and this attitude produces continuous violations against humanity. Invasion of other nations is endlessly justified by claims of making the invaded people more democratic, while the rest of the world asks, "Does this invasion promote the welfare of the citizens and their homes for what is more important to protect than the right to live? Or is it just an expression of brute force so that the individuals in one country may be more powerful than those in another? There is a necessity to study the importance of human rights. There are superb human rights declarations that are only seen as proper statements isolated from legal and practical matters. Governments sign treaties but do not enforce them in national law. Governments are also occupied in eternal quarrels about territories and weapons leading to more human rights crises instead of less. It seems that humankind is not able to make a reasonable synthesis where authenticity of the moral judgments inserted in declarations of principles could reach the force of a commandment. It is a flagrant opposition between laws of the particular nations and the international agreements on ethical purposes. Then, it is impossible to apply the decrees that are already consented, in a real-time term. We live in a cruel world where ignominious decisions are transformed, in short periods of time into drastic actions against human life. Day by day, month by month, we reach terrible levels of anguish seeing photos of babies starved to death and mothers submitted to the most pitiless indignity, while men and women self-considered owners of the Right, decide on their destinies and mark in the map human ruins. Machiavellian of our times are ready to execute babies in the name of law, justice and even greater world peace. It is as if they have no fear of God -- do not see His face in the face of every person. There cleverness has failed them to be heroes in the eyes of the world. 5. SOLUTIONS a. Seeking a General Solution Ever so often, dreams inspire change. Here are some of my dreams:
b. A feminine solution: Cherchez le femme The career woman has arrived -- whether she makes millions of dollars or a few Pesos. Whether pushed by ability or need, women of all nations, faiths and religions are now more than ever engaged in a crucial process of survival. Education and social reform are allowing young girls to survive and create a future. But this is not enough. They need to be better informed, in order to construct a new philosophical thought capable to sustain a reasonable value scale. Women are the key to solve Third Millennium problems because they have a feminine eye that allows their vision to be more humanistic and more organized. This woman is, therefore, important to society and has her place in government and social organization. Like a wave of sweet velvet over a rough skin, women can transmute anguish into pleasure, agony into gratification, distress into fulfillment. Men through all our spiteful history have managed the world. Perhaps the moment has arrived for the instant of womanly wisdom and cleverness? Human rights are, first and foremost, children rights, and no one is closer to the child than the mother. Remember that when we talk about "women’s power" or a woman’s role in social emancipation. CONCLUSION: Lessons in Creation: Learning from Ants When I was a little girl, I used to study the movements of the ants. I lived in a house with a beautiful garden. There were red, white and black ants. They were bigger or smaller, but their different species lived in some kind of harmony. They had separated territories and dissimilar needs. They did not fight half as often as humans do. Their sense of teamwork and cooperation, superb. If each human did his own job right, held each grain in its place, then the mountain of problems that we face could be solved in a simple march of ants. In our foolishness we have told ourselves so often that we the human beings are the most perfect expression of Creation. But I wonder what those tiny ants would say about us if they only knew. Perhaps the only way to rewrite what human rights are in the new millenium is by rewriting what we are as human beings. About the Author(s): See under Our Contributors to find out about the Author(s) of this article or check her website http://www.authors-inc.com/mariacristinaazcona.html |
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