Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They are privileges.
COVID-19 has sparked a wave of restrictions on people’s rights and freedoms across the globe. Many of these restrictions have a very real -both positive and negative- impact on people’s everyday lives.
Perhaps these restrictions serve a good purpose, specifically in avoiding or limiting the overload to our largely unprepared health care systems. Irrespective of the effects we mustn’t forget that history is full of examples were ‘good motives’ were cited to limit and/or blatantly violate peoples rights for the benefit of society. More often then not we find that, with the benefit of hindsight, these violations were nothing more then yet another ugly and embarrassing chapter in our history books.
For that reasons now is a good time to give the concept of rights some thought. You will probably realise that your rights are more like an abstract and subjective list of privileges. Anyway, watch George Carlin talk about rights and make up your own mount about this subject.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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