I think that one of the things the United States has to offer the world is our halting, struggling, effort to ensure human rights for our own citizens and to encourage others to respect human rights.
Thus, this should prove very interesting. Our Department of State is submitting us, this fall, to the scrutiny of the "universal periodic review" process, run by the U.N. Human Rights Council. This is the UN Human Rights Council that former President Bush refused to join because it was dominated by nations judged to have bad human rights records.
So, it will be interesting to see how this all turns out this fall.
Regards — Cliff
How well established are Human Rights in the US? Are we deeply committed to them, or only when it suits our (personal) needs? I am concerned, frankly very concerned.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that we even need to have discussions or debates about the "goodness" of torture; the fact that we cannot have a civilized discourse about political differences without some falling back to the pre-civil rights act behavoir; these are NOT promising indicators about the health of our tolerance for civil or human rights.
That "all men are created equal" appears to apply only to those men we agree with, at least for a whole bunch of tea-party activists.
Yesterday's display of that intolerance in Washington DC is very disturbing and a huge disservice to grassroots movements.
Not that I disagree with Ron's observations, I do have two thoughts.
ReplyDeleteFirst, and perhaps most important, I'm not so certain that we can call much of the political scene a violation of civil rights, or even human rights, so much as it is a growing loss of simple civility. It reminds me of the alleged story of how guns became a part of air warfare wherein someone threw a brick at an opposing pilot, striking him and injuring him. In a fit of pique, that pilot returned to the air the next day with a pistol. It seems today that one bad deed only begets a worse one, and sadly, civility has become little more than a rarely used word.
Second, there is a very fine line between what is acceptable intolerance and unacceptable intolerence. Using the current mess with health care reform, and the growing disgust with ever increasing governmental power as a case in point, it seems that those who oppose it are branded as intolerent rabble. But it is that very encouragement of intolerence that has made America what it is or was.
I am just guessing that the Minutemen were probably very intolerent of the British, to the point of wanting to deprive them of their "civil right" to control the colonists of fledgling America. And like the display in DC, I think I can recall some colonists spitting on British soldiers and calling them names. Come to think of it, I was called horrible names and spat upon by Americans during the Vietnam War days.
How established are human rights in the US? Well, if the truth be known, probably no better than any other major nation state in the world. Certainly, we are the source of many, many clandestine violations of human and civil rights in just the last half century.
This doesn't excuse it and does not attempt to lay on a national guilt trip either. We MUST continue to find ways to mitigate our human tendency to inflict inhuman suffering on others. And, we must be always cognizant of the old admonition of my third grade school teacher that when we point a finger at someone else, there are 4 fingers pointing back at yourself.
I know from the Press that Rep Barney Frank thinks it is Chaos, but the voting is going down this afternoon, best I can tell. And, not every protestor on the Mall was from the Tea Party movement. There were all those folks pushing for giving citizenship to illegal immigrants.
ReplyDeleteI guess that from my point of view it was not as bad as the early 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy was right, but very wrong in how he went about presenting his case. Or WWI, when President Wilson would have denied us many of our rights.
And, the Tea Party movement seems to be becoming more mainstream. See this "Metro Section" Article in The Sunday Boston Globe. While you can't see me in the photos, if you look at the print edition, in the fifth photo (third black and white) you can see my hat.
I see the glass half full and worry about Europe. Others see the glass half empty here and think that freedoms may be better protected in Canada or overseas. It is a debate well worth having, in that Freedom is important to many of us. But understanding what constitutes freedom is not the same for everyone.
Regards — Cliff