Copyright © 2022 PJ Stassen
All Rights Reserved💢 INSISTING ON OUR HUMAN RIGHTS IS NOT MANDATORY. Exercising one's human rights is not mandatory; no government can force a citizen to exercise his/her human rights against his/her will. It is the citizen's choice to, depending on circumstations or in a particular situation, either to insist on or not to insist on his/her rights. Exercising one's human rights is an optional society choice and privilege, not a do-or-die mortal duty just because it is legal (that is, assuming when or where such are legal). Just because bungy-jumping is legal does not mean that everyone is obliged to do it.
💢'LEGAL' DOES NOT ALWAYS NECESSARILY MEAN 'FAIR'. A ‘human right’ may be legal but that does not necessarily mean it will always be fair. No citizen has the right to, e.g., stand on his/her human right to protest in public by barricading a road at the expense of another citizen’s human right to access his/her workplace to work and earn a day’s wage. Those who punish workers who refuse to strike or protest by refusing them access to their workplace are not standing on their (the strikers') human rights, they are denying other workers (non-strikers) their human rights as enshrined in the Constitution. That is called Fascism and in total confrontation with both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Employers ought to make it their life's work to educate their employees in the spirit and letter of the Constitution and the true meaning of the concept 'human rights'.
Fascism: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
💢 THE HUMAN RIGHT TO DECLINE A HUMAN RIGHT. The noblest of all human rights, i.e., the one that nobody ever talks about and few probably know about, is the human right to decline, surrender or forfeit a human right voluntarily.
Courtesy in society is as indispensable in the arenas of Politics, Culture, Business and Economics as Courtesy is indispensable for motorists in traffic. Declining, forfeiting or surrendering a human right voluntarily of one’s own volition when expedient, e.g., like giving up one’s position in a queue at the Post Office or in the Bank, or one’s seat in the bus or train to the elderly or disabled, is the oil that lubricates human relationships and the flow of the social machinery in society.
Humans are born naked, illiterate and undomesticated little savages and unless trained, educated and drilled in the rules of good neighbourliness, usually grow up 'clothed' but still (socially) illiterate savages.
Everywhere we look we see such intransigent, incorrigible citizens here and there (irrespective of socio-economic status, skin-tone, gender or political affiliation) all day long insisting on standing on their ‘human rights’, some legal and some not, e.g., the wealthy jockeying for the most lucrative directorships, corrupt politicians with their greedy, oily paws in municipal budgets and labour-union activists ‘demanding’ exorbitant wage increases (wether government or big business can afford it or not) and selfish (minimum wage driven) job protection laws that bar entry-level and homeless & unemployed from gainful employment.
💢ONLY THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE. They say there are basically only three kinds of people (not Asian, Black, Coloured & White as the government's racially driven race classification laws want to dictate) but the three kinds of 'DECENT/KIND', the 'UNDECENT*/UNKIND' and as always, the 'UNDECIDED'. The time to decide where we belong has arrived. Are we decent and kind or not?
* Not to be confused with 'Indecent'.
“Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.”
(Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745)
Acknowledgements:
InternetPoem.com. Jonathan Swift. Online.
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