Mission Impossible: Universal Civil Rights
Imagine a world where everyone is accepted for who they are and they don’t have to worry about being judged by the world around them. In Kenji Yoshino’s “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights” he talks about creating a new civil rights which would do just that except just for North America. He promotes not covering, putting on a façade, to start this process. One place where we could begin being ourselves is online, by collaborating everyone’s intrinsic ideas, according to Marshall Poe’s “The Hive”. But not everyone one has a computer. That’s when Thomas Friedman’s “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention” comes out to publicize supply chains which are different countries collaborating to make something together, like Dell computers, all over the world, which could altogether stop wars between united countries. This could potentially create a Universal civil rights. If other countries can forget our differences to work on a project together then maybe we could also work together to agree on a Universal civil rights. There’s just a few elements that are stopping this from happening that include disagreements in religion, culture, and computer access could thwart this mission before it even gets started.
Religions all around the world have varying definitions on what is okay and what is not okay. Most religious people think that gay people should not get married. In the Bible it talks about Sodom and Gomorrah which are two cities that were supposedly corrupted by evil, greed, and sexually crazed people. Then God came along and burned these cities straight to the ground. These cities were also very likely to be gay and that’s why religious people are against it, because they think God sees it as a sin or an immoral act. According to this they are not accepting of gay people because they think it will bring about God’s wrath on everyone else as well. Some people that should be included in civil rights are not because of these so called “sins”. Things like being transgender, addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, sex before marriage, abortions of children not wanted, pregnancy contraceptives and others are frowned upon as well in religions. Religions have pressured sinning people to be their false selves to help make them be accepted by the majority instead of being their true, authentic selves. Yoshino says, “In looking for a vocabulary for this quest for authenticity…object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott makes a distinction between a True Self and a False Self that usefully tracks the distinction between the uncovered and covered selves. The True Self is the self that gives an individual the feeling of being real, which is ‘more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.’ The True Self is associated with human spontaneity and authenticity: ‘Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.’ The False Self, in contrast, gives an individual a sense of being unreal, a sense of futility. It mediates the relationship between the True Self and the world (482).” If getting these true selves to be supported by religions is hard, then creating a Universal civil rights is going to be even harder because that’s just one step to getting it passed around the world.
Cultures have a powerful impact on what people do in their daily lives. The way we have grown up in our own home could be a different culture then at your neighbor’s house. Examples of these cultures are gathering around at your dinner table, watching your family’s' fights, discussions, and habits, and taking notice of their terms of endearment. If we tried to bring a universal civil rights to places with a definite culture setting, we’d be messing with the balance of their traditions. They would probably disagree with our new proposals because that would mean changing their way of life. We might even have to change our way of life as well. Friedman suggests that, “Once people get a taste for whatever you want to call it – economic independence, a better lifestyle, and a better life for their child or children – they grab on to that and don’t want to give it up (126).” These changes would be for the better of our society and they would most likely love them but we would be reluctant to changing them. It’s like asking everyone to become vegetarians so that we can save animals lives. It’s a good idea, but not all of us physically want to stop eating meat because we’ve been doing it since we’ve been born and we don’t want to stop. If we ask different countries to give up on their cultures for a Universal civil rights it might sound good, but they probably won’t stop because they’ve been doing it forever and it’s just a habit they have formed.
The easiest way to collaborate with people around the world is with computers. Websites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook all let us express our true selves for the world to see. Poe expresses that, “Given the right technology, large groups of self-interested individuals will unite to create something they could not produce by themselves, be it a sword-and-sorcery world or an index of Web sites on Pamela Anderson (267).” People on all of these sites could collaborate and change the world view. They could either agree with us and click the follow button, or hate our ideas and ignore us. Some people might follow you but then our views change so they will either unfollow us or block us if they don’t want us to know about it. But there is a fatal flaw about computers. They are not readily available for everyone. Computers might be easy to get in the United States but in other countries getting one would be like a dream come true. But since the internet is where we spread most of our ideas on a Universal civil rights, they would be out of the loop resulting in an “Almost Universal civil rights”. The problem with this is that it can’t be a universal civil rights without the inclusion of the whole universe.
All in all a Universal civil rights is not quite possible because you would have to get past at least these three problems concerning religion, culture, and computer access to even get started on making it worldwide. We might be able to begin this process by starting city by city, state by state, country by country, then maybe we could finally get to the end result of having a Universal civil rights. But that would take a bunch of collaborating, agreeing, and accepting to make that even begin to happen. I just don’t see that taking place in our generation.