Friday, September 14, 2007

Rights

Rights, rights! Who can regard them seriously? Take the right to life. I translate that as the right to food, shelter, clothes, clean water, clean air. No mention of health care or education – I'm staying with the basic five. How many of us have these things? And liberty? How many of us can freely choose our leaders? Our way of life? Move unhindered beyond our borders? To make it worse, eexercising our supposed rights can get mighty complicated. Are you, gentle reader, vigilant for your health, exercising your freedom to betake yourself to the supermarket so that you might purchase bottled water and avoid the deadly microbes in the stuff out of the tap, thus preserving that life to which you imagine you have a right? Well, turns out that the plastic bottle won't leach dioxins into the water as that alarmist e-mail has warned. That's an "urban legend". Rolf Halden of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Centre for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has, however, advised that "city water is much more highly regulated and monitored for quality... [while] Bottled water... can legally contain many things we would not tolerate in municipal drinking water." Stay with me on this. Freedom to choose the water we drink, and our right to clean water are tangled up here, and furthermore, intertwined with a host of other things, like simple literacy, and less simple access to cyberspace. The moral of the story is that lots of us, rich and poor, are drinking lousy water: some, because there are fewer and fewer clean springs, rivers and uncontaminated aquifers; some because where there is water, those whose business it is to see that it's potable fail to do that job (remember Walkerton?), and some because they go off hunting for clean water in a plastic bottle, which may just be a bad place. In sum, it seems to me that too few people throughout history have had the most basic rights, and so few people nowadays exercise even the palest resemblances of them, that I just don't believe. Relative privilege, though, is another matter, and that I'll tackle soon., if God spare life.

9 comments:

FSJL said...

Well, as I wrote a long time ago:

first weavings of our silly state
are hundreds dead and more to die
and these blank faces on the street

mister gog our democrat
flashing dark glasses concreted voice
delivers us from freedom

clarabella said...

Don't know if I could say it any better than that, but since no less a one than our region's newest Nobel Laureate, Sir Vidia, says he cannot? will not? shall not? respond to poetry, I give myself leave to carry on at a little length. Also, I have strong feelings on this matter. People keep hypnotizing us with this fiction, never mind the way of life predicated on it continues to fail us all, especially our most vulnerable. I will write shortly of the man who lamented his lack of shoes until he met a man who lacked feet, for there is much that may be gleaned from that fable...

FSJL said...

Sir Vidia is a great writer, no doubt, but also a great sufferer of craniorectal intromission.

I can understand your feelings on the matter.

clarabella said...

Prof:
I'm glad you can understand my feelings on the matter. Can you understand Sir Vidia? Doesn't like women and doesn't like poetry... Poor man. That's a lot to be missing...

FSJL said...

Frankly, I find Naipaul to be like the peace of god -- passing all understanding.

clarabella said...

I find myself compelled to ask you to expand on that...

FSJL said...

I mean that he's beyond my comprehension -- the Third World is engaged in self-destructive behaviour, but Hindutva is just fine; nothing was created in the West Indies, but he can find joy in discovering the history of Chaguanas; the British are really all arrogant snobs, but a knighthood's just the thing.......

FSJL said...

Oh, the allusion is to a saying of James I on the poetry of John Donne: 'Dr Donne's verse is like the peace of god, it passeth all understanding.'

clarabella said...

Fragano:
Yep, I often believe Sir Vidia is leading us all a merry dance – then I remember the Paul Theroux thing, and Diana Athill's comments in STET, and how much Naipaul despises women... On that other matter, isn't it poetry after Donne that Eliot diagnoses as having a dissociated sensibility? Perhaps James 1 was a man ahead of his time?