One of the most misused words in our blessed English language is the word “right.” Used, uh, rightly, it's appropriate. Used wrongly, and I have fodder for this present column.
When can “right” be right? Well, let me count (a few of) the ways: One, you can be right or you can be wrong; two, you can sleep on your right side or your left; and three, you can right a capsized canoe. (Grammar geeks: Notice how I used the word “right” in three separate parts of speech.) When we add politics, anatomy, mathematics, and a host of other disciplines, to the mix, we have a wide variety of appropriate applications.
However, in my growing cynicism of certain forms of education, economics, and employment, I am seeing a horrific use (thus, “abuse”) of the term and the experience of “right”--or better, “rights.” Or you understand my angst by using a common synonym, “entitlement.”
Much of today's misunderstanding revolves around what we feel we deserve, versus what we should see s a privilege. When that line is blurred, and it is these days, we have serious trouble—trouble, as in chaos, confusion, and instability.
There are some very basic rights that all members of a civilized and global society should have. I see safety on the streets and workplace, personal respect for all, a roof over our head, enough food to survive--just for starters.
Then beyond these broad strokes, there is clearly room for the freedom of worship, leisure, friendship, and opinion. There is also, in an ironic sense, freedom to not cram religion, leisure, friendship, and opinion down others' throats, too. It has always struck me as funny (in a sad way) that the opponents to traditional families, home education, and healthy living are permitted to have their rights, so why not their proponents?
You see, no one has an inalienable right to own his own home, to a post-secondary education, to full-time employment, to a long life, etc. These are not rights; they are privileges and should be treated as such. They should be pursued with complete vim and vigour, and once obtained, they should be cherished, protected, and developed.
Do I have a right to be healthy? No. Do I have a right to have a happy family? No. Good health and family life are privileges and should be treated as such. Conversely, do I have a right to dismiss someone who isn't healthy (= the weak, the infirmed?) Again, no. Do I have the right to take out someone who is different from me? Of course not.
I trust you can see the connection between an apparently superficial discussion on rights, on the one hand, and the serious ramification of the abuse of rights, on the other. It is one thing to disagree with someone else's right, but that's as far as it should go. I have no problem when others express their opposing opinions, even their outrage. It's a free country, and we all have that right.
That's why the Human Rights Act, for example, can be so dangerous. Two things come to mind when I write those words: One, it has been misnamed; and two, it has been misapplied. Perhaps it should be called something like the “Selective Human Rights Act.”
It's rather ironic, isn't it, that in the context of human rights, certain convictions and practices are trampled in order to cave in to those of others.
While we don't have inalienable rights in education, economics, and employment, it's better to have a society that can read and think, pay its own bills, and maintain a meaningful job, than to have one that cannot.
At the end of the day, ignorance is dangerous, dependency upon the government handouts is scary, and an unproductive populace is a seed plot for for every conceivable difficulty. And certain European countries, on the brink of bankruptcy, have bought into this lie of inalienable rights (read: unaffordable and unreasonable level of perks). They are paying a severe price for such warped thinking.
The student anarchists in Quebec last year felt it was their right to demonstrate. Sorry, but not at the expense of public property and safety. Or clerks who loiter and text during store hours may feel it's their right to do so. No, that job, people, is a privilege, not a right. Go ahead and add racial tension, Idle No More, wildcat strikes, and general lawlessness to that list of examples; these eruptions occur because one person fed another lies about their entitlement.
Am I entitled to express the above opinions? Of course I am. So does the person who chooses to disagree with them. This public debate is a mark of healthy democracy—disagreeing agreeably.
And this, I suggest, is perhaps one of the most basic of all human rights.
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