It has become increasingly clear to me that we in America have an extremely skewed perception of human rights. In America, there seems to be this idea that they encompass only the rights against the most brutal of state repression. But this is an ultimately narrow-minded approach to what we deserve in terms of giving us a decent quality of life.
First, we have to consider the most basic of necessities: food, water, and shelter. The absolute bare minimum. The fact that we live in a society that wastes somewhere between 30% to 40% of its food supply while there are 38.3 million people in America who are food insecure is a sign of a serious societal failure. This isn’t a matter of not having enough food, it is a matter of distribution and waste. If something isn’t profitable to sell, it’s thrown away or destroyed and made inedible.
Water is required by every breathing human being and the fact that we still treat it like it is an option or a debate is inexcusable. The long process of working out the water crisis in Flint or the complete lack of listening to the concerns of indigenous people regarding Line 3 are just a few examples of our culture failing to act.. Water is a right and everyone in this country deserves to live in a place where they have access to safe drinking water.
Shelter is the last of what I would consider to be the base level of what everyone in this country deserves. We need to look at the population of people experiencing homelessness not as a personal failure, but as a societal failure. How have we become a society that would gladly let someone go through that experience? We have all the resources we need to make sure everyone within our borders, our space, has the basic necessities to live, but we don’t. Whether it be from a point of thinking that some people just don’t work hard enough or by some measure they “deserve it,” it is not a requirement that people live up to some standard of productivity to be able to live their lives in peace and comfort. Everyone deserves these things as a right of being a living conscious being.
More than just the absolute bare minimum, the necessities to interact with a modern society should be guaranteed. This means things like internet access, transportation, and access to technology. This isn’t the 90s anymore. The idea that something like a smartphone isn’t a necessity in modern life is ridiculous. Access to the internet and technology is a requirement for school, for job applications, many jobs, especially while people are working from home during a pandemic. Technology isn’t an option or a luxury anymore. It is a huge part of the way we interact with the world and modern society.
Transportation is another thing that we cannot consider a luxury. Cheap and decent public transportation in this country is sorely lacking and we pay the price with car repair bills, gas prices, and the huge barrier that is the requirement to own a car in order to get around. As said before, the basic necessities of food, water, shelter, and the means to interact with a modern society should be guaranteed. Yes, this would obviously increase productivity. But we shouldn’t be in this for the economic factors, we should care about it because it is right. We as a culture should be able to look at ourselves and know we are doing everything we can to take care of our fellow humans.
Craig Thomas can be reached at [email protected]