I read in a Brazilian blog that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is about to complete 60 years: 60 years of massive, universal praise, and of equally massive, universal oversight. I wanted to start a topic here about this. About the institution of torture in the US, about the persistent slavery in Brazil (interestingly enough, no link for an article in English anywhere to be seen — it’s pretty damn serious, believe me), about the touristical apathy towards the mothers of May in Argentina, about Blackwater and 24 and Queen Rania of Jordan. About how each and every article of the Declaration of Human Rights has been persistently, consistently — forgive the word — raped for the whole 60 years of its existence.
I didn’t want to just bring despair, by all means, but to discuss solutions, culture, attitude. Because this is a young forum: a forum full of young people; but also a very mature forum: not only because of its key members being experienced adults (yes Moogle, I’m looking at you ); because in this forum like no other there’s this sense of respect and civility in discussions.
Instead, I’m just going to post a link, a link which I originally found in one of the comments to that blog post which prompted me to make this topic (well, to be fair, all links in this post except for one come from that entry). A video recording of a brilliant speech, delivered by Chilean novelist Isabel Allende: a video that took me aback, for being so powerful, so true, so honest. Here’s the video. I hope you guys watch this and come back to this topic: write, write what you think, share your opinion, your hopes, your fears.
In LD4all, there have been many discussions which were locked or removed because, being controversial, they had degraded into flame wars. Well, this is just not the case. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is commonsense: if anything, it’s the one value that we all have in common, no matter what country we come from, the one dogma that is common to all of us. And the fact that the Declaration has never been put to practise anywhere — that by its standards we all, regardless of our involvement in it, live in barbaric, inhumane civilisations — is not really a mystery shared only by initiates in a secret tradition: it’s out there for anyone to see, it’s evident, it is — if anything — painfully obvious.
This has got to change, and I believe we can change it. So! Thoughts? Feelings?