Depending on where you look, or who you ask, there are a number of “rights” that all human beings are afforded at birth (if not before). But that number seems to waver from time to time — at least in terms of how many actually exist and how many we can honestly depend on. There are a total of 30 of them mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and you can find a list of them on the internet if you’re that interested. But do such things really, tangibly exist? And, if so, who says so, who wrote them down and voted on them and how in Hell do they know all this with such certainty?
We yell things like “We have rights!” when we feel that somebody might be trying to take one of them away from us. But where does it say we have them in the first place? It’s not in the Bible, or any other religious source. Yes, yes, I know there is a Bill of Rights in America, and any country worth its salt can point towards a number of things that their own countrymen (and even their women, on occasion) should enjoy as members of that particular society. But is that an absolute truth — or is it just hot air?
I’m starting to think it’s as much the latter as it is the former: just ask the Taliban… or the Mennonites… or…
For without the right to die — to decide how, when and where — what else do we have? In the United States, we have the right to make a will, to be of “sound mind and body”, and to say how we want to divide up our earthly possessions. But in very few states is that sovereignty afforded us upon the hour of our death. Even if we’re awake and aware and able to coherently make that decision on our own, the law and the state and even modern medicine itself steps in and tells us, “Not so fast…”. And what we want, as the patient, is often swept aside in the drive to keep us alive for as long as possible, even if that means in pain and despair and even if it’s the absolute opposite of our own wishes and desires.
And that sucks.
I wrote a play, How to Fight Loneliness, which is on at the Park Theatre in London, in which one of the characters, a roughneck, blue-collar American named Tate, is asked by a young couple for his help in ending the life of the wife, a cancer patient named Jodie. Tate has been tapped for this duty because it is whispered that he helped an ailing step-brother pass away when he was younger. And, in the present, Tate is open to doing the same for Jodie. Is this because he believes so fervently in “assisted suicide”?
Hardly.
Is it because he’s a man of great religious conviction and he’s sure this is what God would want if only He would make His will evident to his followers?
Absolutely not.
Tate is willing to support Jodie because they went to school together and she was nice to him and, most of all, because she’s asking him to do it since no one else in her life is willing or able to, including her husband and herself.
So Tate does it because he believes he’s helping her, not hurting her, and because he believes it is Jodie’s right to make that decision and no one else’s. Simple as that.
When my mother passed away not long ago, she begged me for my help in her final days, but I was only able to read to her and whisper kindnesses and hope for the best. In the end I signed the papers for her to go to a hospice and that was that. She passed away in due time and in relatively little pain by that point, but long after the time when she wanted all the agony and suffering to go away but no one listened to her: not the doctors nor the specialists nor the many nurses who bustled in and out of her room, asking her to “be quiet and stop shouting”.
And there I stood, hoping and wishing and praying but not really doing anything at all. Did I make a fuss? Yes, some… but not enough.
So this woman who never wished ill on anybody in her lifetime was denied the right to die, to be relieved of her misery and to leave this Earth when she decided it was time — Socratic oaths be damned — which is what leads me to ask how many rights we really do have and what those rights might be.
Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hate anybody. Talk if you want to and vote for whomever you care to. At least until somebody tells you otherwise or your government decides you really don’t or shouldn’t have those rights and then they’re changed. Is that Orwellian of me? Not really — and I had to name-drop somebody because this is an essay, after all, and it’s supposed to sound important and researched and all the shit that people do when they write these things.
But not this one, not this time. This is simply a question, straight from the gut: if we Earth-dwellers honestly have rights, why wouldn’t “the right to die” stand chief among them?
According to my country, I do have “the right to peaceful assembly” but that doesn’t seem to include putting up a tent or overstaying my welcome. And depending on how a university or the police or even the White House is feeling, that right can be revoked in a dizzyingly short period of time, along with my ass being kicked off campus and maybe even suspended.
Depending on where you live, you can believe that you have a right to love whom you want and to vote for whom you want — but one quick governmental overthrow and some junta will laugh in your face when you screech “free love!” and “free speech!” and all the rest of the 30 “rights” you have on that UDHR list (as they’re applying battery clamps to your nipples or nether regions). Thanks for the effort, United Nations, but a lot of the time that list of yours doesn’t actually mean a damn thing. And it’s great when human rights organisations like Amnesty International jump in when they can to help out — but sometimes there’s absolutely nothing thing they can do, and you know it and I know it and they know it. Sometimes the baddies win and there’s no justice for it and that’s just the way it is.
“If we Earth-dwellers honestly have rights, why wouldn’t ‘the right to die’ stand chief among them?”
I know, I know, I’m preaching to the choir and these all seem like such obvious points, but obvious is what we sometimes overlook or forget about… until it’s too late. I don’t think we have 30 rights. I don’t think we have half that many and, on a bad day (or a bad presidency), we probably have far fewer. They slip away, they get brushed aside and, sometimes, they even get violently taken away. We have rights until somebody bigger or stronger or meaner says we don’t and then we hopefully rise up, we march or talk or scream or fight and sometimes we even win…
And sometimes we don’t.
And another “right” is gone… and another… and another… and pretty soon we’re right back where we were, 50 years ago, or maybe even 100 years ago. Don’t believe me? Just ask any woman you know.
The truth is you’re born and you die (and sometimes you don’t even live long enough to pay taxes), and everything in-between is simply happenstance and luck, good or bad, and to put the rest of it in the hands of “beliefs” and “rights” and what you are “owed” for simply being here with the rest of us is just plain foolishness.
Appreciate what you’ve got, hope you have it again tomorrow, and wish all of it on everybody else. You can’t do much more than, but if you do at least those few little things, then you are so much further ahead of most people in the crowd that it’s not even funny.
And when you really think about this, any of it, for even a second, it’s not really very funny at all.
Of course, you have the right to your own opinion about any of this…
Or do you?
