The Right to What?

OK, after my nice, domestic post, here is my rant. I was thinking last night about the use of the word "rights" by people all up and down the political spectrum. It may be used like this: "It is a woman's right to decide if she wants an abortion" or like this: "It is the right of a person to use firearms to defend his or herself or property." As Americans, we're brought up believing that rights exist because our country is founded on "three inalienable rights": life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, say what you want, but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are three vaguely defined, not to mention arbitrarily chosen qualities of human existence. Not that I don't like Thomas Jefferson or John Locke, in fact, it's the complete opposite. I think people should actually listen more to what Thomas Jefferson had to say, instead of saying, "well, he was a good writer, but he was a perv." There's so much more to it than that.

At any rate, TJ and Locke say that life and liberty are rights that every human being should have. Jefferson changed Locke's "property" to "the pursuit of happiness," but this is a country where a large portion of the population equates property with the pursuit of happiness, so it all works out anyway.

Let's, however, take inalienable rights down to a more basic level. Let's say that any living human being as the right to: continue living, be healthy, have enough food, have clean water, and have a reliable shelter. Now, that's not asking much. But isn't it funny that, all around the world, every day, innocent people are killed, babies are born HIV positive, people suffer from malnutrition and lack of clean water, and many have no homes or live in cardboard boxes? These basic things, requisite for people to simply live a normal life-span, not to mention live happily, are denied to millions of people around the world. Even if I say that people have these rights, that still doesn't give them what they need. The truth is that "rights" is an empty word.

This country has gone on long enough with its entitlement trip. I'm sure that at some point in the last couple of years, people were saying that it was the right of PC users to be able to use iPods. People in this country never tire of saying that it's their right to buy a house and a vehicle as big as they want, which will take up more energy than they will ever need.


I say that if we are interested in improving the human condition, we should stop using this term, which has done just as much evil, if not more, than it has good. We've been battling long enough about who has rights to what. Let's change the terms, get everyone who has never struggled to live off the idea that they are intrinsically entitled to anything, and we'll go from there.