Cartoon by Mikail Çiftçi

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 77: A reminder for our lost world

By Janet Marugg, Columnist

FāVS News: 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 brick by brick and healing broken bodies bone by bone.

It was also a year for building new things that cannot break, things that will last until the last of us. It was a time of revolutionary declarations 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 malnutrition in one generation undermines the health of grandchildren. They were just tired of recording the horrors of dehumanization of the world at war. So they decided to give us human rights.

Today we have the same 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 Dec. 10, 1948, they signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In a nutshell, humans have the right to live in safety and peace. The freedom from slavery (of course). The right to justice and equality free from torture or degradation (dehumanization). We have the right to food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education. We have a right to marry, procreate, and form relationships and to assemble. To worship in our individual conscience.

We have a right to freedom of expression, thoughts and privacy. We have a right to work and to move freely. We have a right to leisure. And we have a 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 maximizing of human well-being today and for generations to come. But it also serves to define 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 both dealing with past human traumas and the responsibility 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 to 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 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.