Defending human rights

It is the duty of each one of us to try his/her best to defend the human rights of all the people who share our society. Thought it is rather easy said than done. The human rights that we define are based on different theories and different factors that are active in our society that might be not in our control. There are class differences that play an important roles on the decisions made about the rights of people. Different people have different religions and different cultures. They think that their religious and cultural differences are better than others. That is why they may only care for the human rights of their own group and not worry so much about what happens the people that are out of the group. Is the same way the attitude of different people to others based on gender is different. Some might think that the people of the different gender are lesser and hence they treat them with less respect. On the other hand there are people who give equal respect to each and every one irrespective of their religion, gender, age and race.

Race and Ethnicity

The world has become a global village. People move from one country to another in search of job and better living. In the developed countries we can observe that there is a mix of people. These countries have more job and education opportunities and this is why they have people from all colors and religions. Due to the presence of diverse people, there is always a debate going on in these countries about how to protect people from being racially abused.

Identifying different racial groups to be of lower status began in the French aristocracy. The main aim was to defend their privileges against the revolution. They propagated that they are conquers over the Celtic Conquered. This influenced the superiority behavior of the Europeans over the people they had colonized. In the nineteenth century the European had fabricated scientific theories to suggest that they are the superior race. These theories have long been rejected. The point that I want to make here is that humans have for centuries tried to violate the rights of others by simplistic excuses of my race being better than yours. In the present world things have been changing and due to the act that the world is an open market, people with power try to collect more of the market share to influence others. There are less human rights abuse cases based on racial inequality compared to a few decades ago.

Power and Class

In our class discussion we had discussed that power, in order to be exercised need two people, a goal and a plan. The forms of power are organized money, organized people and organized mana. When we talk about organized money, as suggested by Marx, the people who own corporations and industry get to hold the majority businesses in their hands. The people who work in the fields or in the factories have no or less importance. The other segment of the society that has skills are also abused by the wealthy or powerful and they buy their skills for a cheaper prices. The labor and the skillful people are utilized in order to make bug profits. At the end the profits are kept by the wealthy and powerful and the other two classes of people i.e. labor and skillful people get almost nothing. I believe that the Marxist revolution in Russia and other parts of the world had a greater impact on the overall labor laws. The rich and powerful realized that they had to think about the welfare of the other classes of the society and hence new labor laws were introduced to protect the rights of the working class. At present we cannot say that all the people in the world get the wages and facilities they deserve but we can surely say that if there was no Marx, the condition would have been a lot worse.

Gender issues in human rights

The history of the world is full of abuses directed at women because they are considered the children of a lesser god. Though we can see that religions have an overall message of peace and equality but when it comes to specifics, there is a visible misogyny in the teachings of all major religions. There are many reasons that women are not treated equal. For example Marx viewed capitalism and the hunger of overcoming others to be the main driving force behind treating women with less dignity. This argument could be very true if we for example look at the share of women in the inherited wealth according to the teaching of some religions. Mary Dale has stated that Chinese have practiced foot binding and exclusion of women from ancestral wealth. So we can say that women might have been abused and degraded in order to control their fair share of wealth.

I personally believe that all of us are humans. We all deserve the utmost dignity and respect. No one should be abused because of their sex or sexual orientation. There are hundreds of examples these days that women are participating in scientific ventures, politics and businesses. This is basically a healthy sign and I think that more and more opportunities should be provided to them.

I believe that human rights should be defended at all casts. The human history has seen many atrocities where human hated and killed each other based on their racial, religious, gender and class differences. It is now the time to advocate respect and equal opportunity for everyone. Also we should work to uplift the lives of those who are in trouble and have no or less access to the basic necessities of life. We should have no bias in doing so. This will ensure a prosperous future for the whole mankind.