Response to Rights

I used to work as a telemarketer. 

Honestly, I didn’t love everything about that job. It was a grind. Anyone who’s ever done it will tell you so. But one thing that I managed never to take for granted during my years of cold-calling business owners, was that when I picked up my phone at 8:30 every weekday morning, I was on the horn with America. 

I was talking to Mom and Pop shops across the nation. And I was talking to them about their dreams. 

I was asking them things like what their dream was like. When they first started dreaming it. How they planned to attain it, and how they thought they could do so faster. 

Now, having spoken with America about its dreams — having spent some good, quality time with America, talking dreams — I can tell you that I believe America has become afraid to dream. 

Afraid, because it is divided against itself. And divided so, because it has lost touch with the American Ethic which was once its unifying pride and joy. America has forsaken the values for which it once stood. Its crusade against tyranny has been replaced by a false enemy, found in terror. Its yearning to breathe free, traded for lusting after fancier airs. 

America has lost its collective grasp on the virtues for which it once stood, and without those virtues in common, Americans have little foundation on which to build trust in each other. 

We lack our old values because we sold them all to the stock market.

And that is our doing. 

We all are responsible for the injury to our American Ethic. 

We uprooted it by picking fights. We burnt it by calling each other names. Insulted it with pointed fingers, and let our ethics be broken because we would rather shirk our mutual responsibility to each other, than create an opportunity for ourselves to be exploited. 

But who is doing the exploiting? 

Is it our countrymen, each attempting to regain a hold of their dream, or is it the institutions which have rewarded us for forsaking those dreams in the first place?

We’ve been so busy purveying our souls to wealthy devils, that we never noticed our values walking out the door with them. And we’ve been so preoccupied with impish frivolities since our values went, that we don’t see a reason to bring them back. So… instead of waging a God’s honest research war against the fragility of life on Earth… instead of letting fly the spirit of innovation for which America is famed and instead of driving humanity forward, fearlessly, unto the great forever… America has been spending our money letting everyone know how “great” we are, because perception is everything.

We’ve got politicians, personalities, and pundits on the air, who produce nothing of particular greatness, insistently pronouncing themselves, and America in general, “great”; but since when has telling people, “I’m great!” become a replacement for being good?

It is our misunderstanding of rights which is to blame for the collective denial of our values. 

We suppose that having rights makes us good, and that we must be good because we have rights. Why else, after all, would we have rights other than due to our inherent goodness? We are clearly ordained by goodness to deserve rights. Are we not? So all things we do are good, and all good we do ensures the existence of our rights.

This entitled way of thinking is a misunderstanding of rights. 

We are not entitled to rights just for showing up.

We are not entitled to rights at all. We are responsible for rights. We earn our rights when we recognize a collective responsibility to advance and uphold those rights for our countrymen. And likewise, if we refuse the rights of our countrymen, we refuse, also, the rights of ourselves.

If we wish to claim a right, then we must commensurately champion that right for every other person; or else what would entitle us to it?

This equal way of thinking about rights turns transgressions against our neighbors into transgressions against ourselves. When rights are responsibilities, trespassing against anyone’s rights serves only to further dissolve our own share of American liberty, which should be appropriate disincentive against trespassing.

For example, (And I use this example as one which would tempt me to infringe on the rights of a person I disagree with) if I hear a person say “All lives matter,” it isn’t for me to shout at them, “You can’t say that!”

It should be the position of an American that all people are entitled to say what they will, because we each are only a product of our environment; having the ideas and persuasions of that environment. But when I protect my countryman’s right to say what they will, I protect my own right to do the same. I preserve my right to ask why they say “All lives matter.” I keep our line of communication open so that we both may come to the whole conclusion that, “Of course all lives matter, but right now black lives are being treated as if they do not matter, so it’s probably appropriate to focus on the lives that are being treated as if they don’t matter, in order to ensure that all lives have the opportunity to exist in the light of justice and liberty.”

If we continue to deny the Rights of our countrymen for fear of being swindled by them; then we will not be entitled to surprise, when our vast American empire goes the way so many empires before it have. 

The Greeks, Romans, and Ottomans didn’t fail spontaneously. Their power outgrow their purpose. They buckled under their growing populations and increasing cultural diversity because they were unable to maintain a singular, powerful Ethic for which all their citizens could stand. Having lost common cause, their empires descended into dissolution. 

But we are not obligated to share a fate with the empires of yesteryear. 

We are, as ever we have been, a City on a Hill. Somewhere along the way we seem to have let go of some of the goodness for which we were once admired. We have, to some not insignificant degree, denied our common responsibilities, and allowed ourselves to become weak with strength. But we are still able to claim responsibility for the future role we may play in the advancement of liberty for ourselves, our posterity, and the entire human race. In the interest of bringing back that sweet, old, American Ethic; we are all responsible for wanting to be good to each other.

By claiming responsibility for each others’ rights, we give ourselves the common ground we need to see each other as countrymen. And when we return our attention to those common grounds, there will be little left to do but return to our dreams, safe and sound; knowing that our fellow American is there standing guard, holding themselves responsible for protecting us.

Ultimately, the way to create a more virtuous America is by being more virtuous Americans. We are responsible for placing less blame, and pointing fewer fingers. We are responsible for letting others speak before we expect to be listened to, and for listening more carefully to what our fellows have to say while we wait our turn. 

We must respect each other to give each other more reason to be respectful. 

We must take responsibility for the individual role we play in maintaining our ethic, and we must recognize that if there is weakness in our ethic, it stems solely from us, its keepers. 

If we hold ourselves accountable for our rights and liberties, and for their accompanying ideology of freedom for all; then we may, once more, begin to see ourselves as American. We will have started our path toward better, and that path will lay itself out unto Good.