We have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," a man once penned during a strangely idealistic age. A world-shaking concept, those rights. A concept which has grown and mutated and spread across the earth. Our rights. The world suddenly became a fair, even playing ground where people are simple chess pieces, bound by predictable laws and moving through life in a complex, but still perfectly just, dance of fortunes. Our rights.
But who granted these rights, over two hundred years ago, and who enforces them? Because whoever it is, he must be new to the job and he sure hasn't got the hang of it yet. Colonial health care involved your life savings and one doctor's bucket of leeches, and trust me, there wasn't a malpractice payoff down the road when he accidentally killed your spouse and child through dirty examination instruments. A black plantation slave still had 3/4 vote more than the landowner's white wife. Neither one could read. A good proportion of children died before hitting puberty, and the terrible health issue of obesity was a much sought-after ailment.
But today we whine about our right to proper health care, our right to a decent education, our right to raise children we can't afford to keep. Our RIGHTS! Why, precisely, do we feel we have claim to these handouts? The rest of our society is shelling out a great deal of cash for privileges we demand for free. Is that fair? When we have 10 kids but work at McDonald's, is it fair to make the Smiths down the road pay for them, the Smiths who are waiting to get pregnant until they have paid off debts incurred while obtaining the university education which enabled them to get the salary which pays for everyone else who dropped out of high school? Why do the Smiths have to pay for our mistakes, our bad planning, our misfortunes, and our poverty? It is a charitable thing, certainly, but when did it become our RIGHT?
And what a monster our rights have become: Now we have the right to sanitized television, to filtered internet access, to clean water and unpolluted air, to cheap electricity, to healthful fast food, to long-term job security, to HMO-paid weight-loss programs, to retirement checks (regardless of financial status), and viagra prescriptions.
Do people in the Congo have any of these rights? What about in Argentina? Russia? Palestine? Oh, wait, that's right, only in America [anthem surges in the background] do we have so many wonderful RIGHTS. Well then, doesn't everyone else then have the right to take it all away from us, using force, if necessary? Be fair, when you run around the world handing people democracy, telling them that we are all equal, regardless of education, economic status, or socio-political history, what conclusion do you expect them to come to? They'll think they deserve to be as carelessly wealthy, spoiled, and coddled as our grand nation. And, when you think about it, it's true enough. Everyone deserves all of our rights equally, which is to say, not at all.
As human beings we have the right to what all animals on this planet have the right to: a chance to eke out our miserable little lives, killing or being killed, struggling to procreate, struggling to climb above all the other animals, but with no guarantees, no free rides, no comforting, omnipresent, merciful RIGHTS protecting us. And just because someone else manages to achieve something more doesn't entitle us to it as well. In fact, given the realities of nature, it tends to *exclude* us from it.
And perhaps when we run around demanding what we think are our RIGHTS, we should consider that by seizing special considerations which we did not earn, through effort, breeding, or by chance, we are dragging the rest of the world down, one right at a time. Every HMO payoff raises the cost of healthcare for everyone, lowering the availabilty of treatment for everyone, punishing the long-term health of everyone. Every child born on welfare lowers the welfare available to responsible adults, increases the gap between government-assisted existence and independent earners, increases the number of people likely to continue living on the dole without ever returning anything to their world. Every community with clean air restrictions takes jobs from that community, every clean water program increases the cost of water for that community, every viagra prescription is another year when birth control won't be covered.
Every right we claim as individuals must be extracted in equal share from someone else. And that, perhaps, is the best view of our rights. We have the right to screw everyone else, for as long as we can get away with it. But no matter what we call it, that particular exercise will never be noble, just, or for the betterment of mankind. It is just another petty degradation of our society as a whole, and when that degradation has finally progressed to the point of collapse, trust me, those with a college education, those with foresight and kindness and the spirit of invention, those humanitarians won't be there to bail humanity out. Because they've been doing it for far too long and getting nothing but shit for it. Because that's our right.
![[bluehost]](http://mleiv.com/wp-content/files/site_images/bluehost.gif)
