It was 77 years ago — a lifetime of yesterdays, still recent enough to remember in a beating heart.
The year of our Lord, 1948, was a flurry of fixing broken things, for rebuilding brick by brick and for healing broken bodies bone by bone. It was also a year for building new things that cannot break, things that will last and outlast. It was a year of revolutionary declarations to be woven into the fabric of humanity and worn like a uniform of human skin.
Before this day, Dec. 10, 1948, people suffered atrocities and violations that bruised the human genome forever. Back in the day they didn’t know that the effects of human trauma are hereditary, making the future prone to suffer anxiety, addiction and mental illnesses. They didn’t know that things like malnutrition in one generation undermines the health of a grandchild’s brain. People grew tired of recording the horrors of dehumanization of the world at war, so they decided to give us human rights.
People today have the divine rights of kings and priests because the nations on earth came together and declared it so. The people of the world declared inherent human dignity and worth. They promised to give each other better standards of life and to ensure individual, human freedoms. On December 10, 1948, they signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In a nutshell, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that people have the right to live in safety and peace. There’s the right to freedom from slavery (of course), to justice and equality free from torture or degradation (dehumanization). We have the right to food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. We have a right to marry, to procreate or not, form relationships and to assemble. To worship from our individual conscience. We have a right to free expression, thoughts and the right to privacy. We have a right to work and to move freely and a right to leisure. We’ve got our right to vote, participate in our governance, and a right to participate in a cultural life.
This Universal Declaration of Human Rights supports human life, the reduction of human harm, and the maximization of human well-being today and for generations to come. It defines the crimes against humanity. It reveals dictators, authoritarians and fascists. It sets precedent to prosecute and gives the world a moral compass.
Personally, I think the world is a little lost. We’re dealing with past human traumas and we are responsible for the generational trauma we genetically pass to the future. But every year, on Dec. 10, we are invited by the internationally recognized Human Rights Day to reset the compass.
Humanists of all stripes (theists, atheists and agnostic) follow a creed of beliefs or aims that guide our actions toward realizing measurable benefits for human beings. As we are all dual citizens of our country and of the world, the Humanist Ten Commitments do a pretty good job reflecting the the aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And because we contain multitudes of humanity’s past and future, we recognize the International Human Rights Day as a day of renewal — a perfect fit for the season of births.
Marugg is a Secular Humanist supportive of healthy communities for both religious and nonreligious people. She can be reached at janetmarugg7@gmail.com.
There’s no time like the present to right humanity’s ship – The Lewiston Tribune
