Bloggers Unite: Human Rights

"Bloggers Unite is an initiative designed to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By challenging bloggers to blog about a particular social cause on a single day, a single voice can be joined with thousands of others to help make a real positive difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or support 3rd world countries."

Today's issue: Human Rights. Instead of posting on a specific human rights issue, I'm going to broaden the discussion and talk about the advantage of using human rights vs. civil rights.

The problem with using "civil rights" in America is that it becomes an American problem to be solved by an entity or entities that have some sort of stake in such a problem. An example would be the rights of an immigrant (legal or illegal) worker to standard living and working conditions. If these rights are violated, it becomes a problem involving, but not limited to, the following entities: the 'x' State government, the ACLU, the 'x' labour union, and a civil- or worker's- rights lawyer.

The problem with civil rights being an American issue is that the majority rules in America. Who is left out?: the minority. So when a civil rights issue becomes a minority issue - and the majority of civil rights issues are minority issues - it becomes a minor issue, an issue of the ignored, an issue of the invisible. This leads to overwhelming indifference from the majority, which ultimately makes it harder to uphold the rights of the minority.

So why human rights? Aren't human rights synonymous with civil rights? In a perfect world, yes. But alas, we are far from a perfect world (or country for that matter). The advantage of using human rights is that human rights are universal (and thus it becomes a global issue instead of an issue of a generally racist, chauvinistic America). Why is this an advantage? Well, for one, it is possible for other governments to put pressure on the United States to live up to the standards we set and hold others to because it is an issue of human- rather than civil- rights.

Furthermore, the issue of minority v. majority is a non-factor because it isn't a minority or majority of people deserving human rights, it is 100% of people deserving human rights. Instead of focusing on the fact that a person may be black, brown, red, yellow, white, purple, blue, and so on, the focus can be the fact that a person is human and deserves the rights of human. (I am in no way saying we should erase a persons color because it is an important part of a person's ethnic and cultural identity - rather, we should focus on the right of a human with no regard to their color.)

It is hard for a person of one color to completely understand what it means to be a person of another color (or a person of one class to understand that of another), and therefore it may be hard to empathize or even care about an issue not relating to oneself. But we are all human and we all understand the basic needs of a human. It will be much easier to erase indifference if we can focus on the basic rights of a human instead of focusing on the rights of a civilian (two completely different beings).

What do you think? Too idealistic? You comments are appreciated.