The Declaration of Evolution

When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

• That all species are created different but equal;
• That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
• That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
• That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
• That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpation's, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

• These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
• They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
• They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.
• They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
• They have claimed private, personal ownership of God's land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
• In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
• In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
• In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
• In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
• In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
• In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
• For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
• In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
• In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
• They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
• In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
• They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
• They have enlisted an army of informers.
• In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
• They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.
  

• They are bores.
• They hate beauty.
• They hate sex.
• They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshiping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God's creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Eaarth

In Eaarth, Bill McKibben paints a picture for us, a picture detailing the intricacies and interwoven nature of this planet we call Earth. He then goes on to tell us that this pale blue dot that we call home is no longer the Earth that we evolved on and the Earth that evolved right along with us, sustaining us all the while, this is a new Earth, one that we no longer know anything about. This new Earth is unpredictable, hauntingly beautiful and seemingly angry. This new Earth no longer plays by the rules we once thought we understood. This new Earth that we find ourselves residents of is a volatile place in which melting ice causes the sun to reflect off the blue of the ocean causing a temperature rise, which in turn causes a myriad of consequences, everything from the release of methane, to peat bogs drying out, to water shortages and hurricanes.

This new Earth is a place in which the poorest and most vulnerable of species, those members of our community that are causing the least amount of harm, are paying the highest price, millions are paying with their lives. This new earth is a place in which most of us avoid personal responsibility, pushing our problems off on someone else, leaving the hard work to the next generation to deal with. But, as McKibben writes, this problem can only be pushed off for so long, because this new Earth, the only home we’ve ever known, is being killed, one drop of carbon and one demolished tree at a time. Future generations are staring back at us through time, silently pleading to us, and begging us to see past our own selfishness and greed.

McKibben bombards his readers with shocking statistics about the acidity of our oceans, the un-breathability of our air, and the annihilation of our forests. He shares with us stories of struggling agrarians and fisherman who are trying desperately to feed their families and of entire countries facing the possibility of evacuation. And this is all happening today, not in the future, and although we haven’t had that much time to study this new Earth we do know one thing, things are speeding up. Processes that used to take hundreds and thousands of years now take a decade or less. The time has run out. As Mckibben tells us, even if every environmental bill was passed that has ever been proposed and every politician kept her promise about cleaning up the air and creating clean energy, it still wouldn’t be enough. We have caused irreparable amounts of damage to the very thing that keeps us alive and now we are left with the consequences of those actions. So now the question is, what are we going to do about it?

Overturned

We are a nation that believes that every man and women is endowed by their creator with inalienable rights and those rights are guarded and sustained by the constitution, not by government officials, not by elected officials and certainly not by ballot initiative. Our rights are fundamental, they are the birthright of every American. That's why we challenged in a court of law the flawed and unconstitutional arguments that long have been used to deny Americans their rights. That gay marriage, a love between two adults is somehow a danger to society, that how we are born, our sexual orientation, not our love or personal commitment, somehow defines a marriage and that state sponsored discrimination is somehow justified and should be institutionalized.

With respect to marriage and after a lengthy trial, a fair trial, the court rejected the false logic that has been used for so many years to rationalize that blatant discrimination. But this trial did more than expose that false logic, it embraced the fundamental American values of freedom and fairness, it upheld the notion that the greatness of this country lies in the ability of each successive generation to broaden the scope of freedom, to deepen the notion of liberty and to strengthen the very principle of justice. Today's decision affirms that under the constitution a government of the people by the people and for the people cannot discriminate against the people.

There is another powerful consequence of this decision that I hope all Americans take into account, today there are millions of gay people across the country: they are your neighbors, your friends and your family, they see how marriage strengthens the bonds of family and community and they wonder, can they ever have that same strength and stability? Or will their government continue to say that marriage is not for them? Today's decision gives gay Americans the hope and strength and comfort that they too can have a future filled with love, commitment and shared responsibility. And so today we begin the process of saying to millions of people who are made to feel ostracized, besieged, bullied and ashamed of how god made them... be who you are, love who you love, and marry who you wish to marry.

As gay and straight citizens take to the streets in celebration here in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas and New York I know there are millions who must celebrate quietly across America. Places where merely taking the hand of a loved one still feels like a revolutionary act. To those quiet millions, to the teenager in Bakersfield who aches for acceptance, to the college student in Salt Lake who only seeks liberty and equality, to the couple in Topeka who longs to openly share their commitment and love - this victory is for you. Because in ending the public sanctioning of discrimination in our law, we render unacceptable the private discrimination you must bear.

This is not the only victory needed to close that gap between the lives you lead and the lives you deserve, but it is a critical victory, one that honors the principles that define America . The principles that stirred a convention in Seneca Falls, the principles that fueled tireless marches through Selma, Birmingham and Washington DC, the principles that sparked the fires of resistance at the Stonewall Inn and the principles that inspire us in this urgent struggle to uphold the right to life, liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness. We will continue to stand up and fight for these principles, for these founding constitutional rights of all Americans until we truly are one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Chad Griffin
President- American Foundation for Equal Rights

Evil Empire Part 2: "Magic" Seeds

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbors prepared their father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now face working as slave labor for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low. Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide. Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting. Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.As neighbors gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. 'He was a loving and caring man,' she said, weeping quietly. 'But he couldn't take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.'

Shankara's crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India's ancient story. But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead. Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiraling debts - and no income. So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops. The crisis, branded the 'GM Genocide' by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a 'global moral question' - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month. Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonizing deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed. Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and 'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll. But that is not the full story. In one small village 18 farmers have committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much. She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.Village after village, families tell how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds. The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds. But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks. The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution. But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many farmers have found there is a terrible price to be paid. Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds' of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite. Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off. Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year. But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That's because GM seeds contain so- called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated , leaving a wife and two children. As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbors squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a genetically modified plant created by Monsanto.

'We are ruined now,' said the dead man's 38-year-old wife. 'We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.' Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbors crowded into her home to pay their respects. 'He was dead by the time they got to hospital.' Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. 'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes. 'He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.'

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this tragedy'. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life. Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.With rumors of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. 'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said. 'We just want help to stop any more of us dying.' India's farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds.

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. 'I told him that we can survive,' his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. 'I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.' But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children's schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.
Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide' - the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these 'magic seeds'. In the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.

Original author: Andrew Malone

The Compound

What started over a year ago as a joke between close friends has now turned into into something that we're all committed to see through to fruition. "The Compound" as we so lovingly refer to it as, has become a lifeline that many of us hold up as the light at the end of the tunnel as we wade through college, jobs and the mind numbing existence that is life in modern America today. In an effort to better prepare for our future life many of us have been looking in to the communal living experiments that have taken place over the past 50 years in order to learn from their successes and failures. The main objective of communal living since the 1960s has been to repersonalize a society, making person to person relations the core of existence to promote greater intimacy and fuller human development. By rejecting the established order on which capitalism rests, competitiveness and production is replaced by unity and cooperative work. In communes people pool their resources and work together instead of against one another because an emphasis is no longer placed on competing for material goods, but instead on friendship and family.When people find out our communal plans they tend to attack it with their preconceptions of what a commune would represent. More often then not images such as drugs and free love associated with the 1960s are visualized. Many people assume that we are Lenin-style Communists, cult members or free-love druggies. In actuality, communes have existed since history has been recorded. For example, the Puritans who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony may have been one of the first utopian communities in the United States. In the late 1960s more than 2,000 communes were formed in the US.
Communal life idealizes social unity and maintains that humanness exists only in intimate and collective life. The commune that we envision would be referred to as a "service" or "intentional" commune in which people pool resources and agree to live a certain way with a motivating philosophy. The primary tenant of a commune is anti-materialism, not having any more than is needed in order for there to be enough to go around the world. It is our belief that it is wrong that some people own 5 million dollar houses while others don't have enough to eat. We are each committed to vegetarian and veganism because we recognize that there would be more food to go around the world and far less environmental degradation if people ate green instead of livestock. More importantly we reject speciesism and recognize that we are all Earthlings, humans and animals alike, sharing the same planet and struggles of life side by side. We believe that neither one has the right to harm the other for their own purposes, especially when the killing of animals is not only entirely unnecessary but harmful to all.When communes first became popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was due to a rejection of capitalism and a desire to return to the basics.It was groups of people who believed in sharing and dividing everything on the basis of one's needs. People started communes in rual areas, seeking a return to the land that they had been alienated from. Through agriculture, communes became more self-sufficient, not having to rely on outside income as much. The growing of food gave a feeling of accomplishment, a connection with each other and with the land. In this way people found a sense of unity with one another and the land. Industrialization boomed after World War II causing the economy to flourish. Many of the young people who grew up during this prosperous time expressed feelings of estrangement, isolation, impersonalization. While their parents were focused on material accumulation after having grown up during the Great Depression, young people felt there was something missing in their lives, a void that needed to be filled. Advances in technology which produced both the atomic bomb and television, made people feel detached from their environment, they felt that they were not in control of it, too far removed from it, and beyond understanding it. Even when it came to food, people felt detached from it or alienated from the process which produced it.It was also because of television coverage of the Vietnam War that people for the first time were actually able to view the consequences of warfare. The My Lai Massacre, for example, vividly showed American troops slaughtering an entire village -men, women and children. There were reports of American soldiers raping women and displaying other barbaric behavior. The print media allowed young people to communicate to other young people. Several underground periodicals devoted specifically to the "get back to the land" ideal were important to the development of the rural commune movement. Along with the prosperity resulting from post World War II, there grew an emphasis on education. Young people had more leisure, education, and security than any previous generation, providing them with the opportunity to question the established order and reflect on alternative options.
Probably the single most potent contributor to the communal movement was the political disruption and what was viewed as hypocrisy of the system during the 1960s. Although the majority of the American people were against the Vietnam war, it still dragged on. Many felt it was hypocritical to claim to be a democratic nation when our President continued a policy that was not supported by the people. Because of Watergate President Nixon had to resign from office and the assassination of those with new ideals such as President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King shocked the country and resulted in many viewing the actions as reflecting a moral deterioration of the United States. Furthermore, the violent break up of political protest resulting in the killing of four students at Kent State University, the deaths of two black students in Jackson, and the assassination of the of Black Panthers leadership, further lead to the disillusionment of young people.
It was the combination of industrialization, technological advancement, prosperity and materialism, political disillusionment, and moral decay that brought people from all around the United States together to flee to rural utopian communes in attempt to escape the Establishment and take control of their own physical, cultural and spiritual environment. In our day and age with technology advancing at a mind spinning rate, it is increasing the potential for further alienation of people from the land and from other people as well. As a result of technological advancement, our economy has moved toward corporate production so much that the small family operated business is becoming a scarcity today. For example, with every new K-mart, Walmart, Shopko, and Target the small town feeling is becoming less personalized. Another example would be the disappearing small farmer due to competition with agribusiness.
We believe that when people are removed from their means to make a living and forced to work as a commodity for a big corporation, the mechanical and impersonal conditions result in alienation, personal dissatisfaction, and a loss of dignity and sense of purpose and with the turn toward Republicanism we see harsher conditions for the working class and a widening the gap between the "have's" and "have not's" and with this widening gap even more crime and social problems will befall the U.S. We believe that communal life is about justice, sincerity, honesty, humanity, and peace. Communes teach us to rethink the status quo, question authority, and stand up for what is right. It is here that we wish to raise our children and live in peace with each other and the land which gives us life.

"You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks...

"You fasten all the triggers
For others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
While the death count gets higher

"You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud...

"I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul."

~Bob Dylan~

Suggested readings
Mary Kay Blakely, Living On The Land
Richard Fairfield, The Modern Utopian
Geaorge Fitzgerald, Communes: Their Goals, Hopes, and Problems
Rosabeth Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective
Edward Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America
Betsy Streisand, Creating An Instant Extended Family
Rachel Meunier, The Farm: Communal Living in the Late 60's and early '70's

Socialized Health Care for Dummies

Our health care in America is a joke. It might be wonderful for a select few but for the rest of us it's downright awful. We are currently ranked 36th in the world with every other country who has universal health care ranking above us. We have 46 million people without insurance, doctors wasting time filling out insurance forms, insurance companies dreaming up ways to avoid paying out to people who faithfully paid their premiums for years and 50% of the 1,458,000 personal bankruptcies in the US in 2001 were due to medical bills. Health care should be considered a universal human right that should be made available to all persons regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or ability to pay. What it comes down to is countries who offer universal health care have happier citizens who live longer and are healthier.

For those who still are not convinced, I have provided some arguments that are posed to my friends and I almost daily, along with our replies:

"I, for one, do not trust our incompetent government to do anything, especially run our health care."

I hope anyone that argues that they don't trust the government to run health care is at least consistent and fights just as hard to get the government to disband the armed forces. If you can't trust the government to try and save lives, you shouldn't trust them to take them either.

That goes for the death penalty too, and really, the entire legal system. An error in the legal system especially as it pertains to the death penalty is, at least in my opinion, much more horrible. Your government making a mistake and purposefully killing someone is much worse than making your wait times for medical care slightly longer.

Most people’s views don’t jive with the facts of socialized health care in Canada or Europe, or of the role and usefulness of government in those countries. Many Americans seem to have an automatic fear of government which is based not on reason or clear facts, but of convoluted theories and misrepresentations of the real facts. Actually many government officials and representative are in bed with the insurance companies. So long as people profit when sick people don't get medical treatment, the system will stay broken, and quite inhumane.

"In Canada as well as England and other countries with socialized health care, you sometimes spend months waiting before seeing a physician. Many people would die just waiting in an emergency room."

Socialized health care has been proven to be far more efficient, fair, humane, and equal. It is not at all perfect, and needs improvement, but the US would be wise to adopt a more social health system rather than a private profit based one where insurance company bureaucrats are making medical decisions.

Although a few people do die waiting for treatment we have far more people who suffer and die because they go untreated due to lack of insurance. Not only is that statement about waiting for care patently misleading - (one only waits for non-emergency or elective specialty care which is based on the same principle as ER triage). Europe and Canada are doing very, very well under socialism. In fact the more socialist the country (Denmark, Sweden) the better off they are. Better education, health, longer life-expectancy, lower infant mortality, more productive, less crime, (because the poor have options and support from the community they don't have to resort to crime and violence out of necessity).

Those stories in which people die waiting for treatment, a rare occurrence, are flaunted about by the conservative news outlets, like Fox, which are owned by giant corporations and run by the elite few who make more money than God. This ruling class will do whatever they need to in order to keep the money pouring into their bank accounts. They recognize that higher taxes would drain them of some of their precious wealth and so they use their media power to spread the idea that covering their asses is in everyone's best interests. For example, the CEO of Fox holds stock in almost every major health insurance company; it would obviously be in his direct best interest to keep people from supporting universalized health care as he would end up losing millions when the insurance companies are forced to lower their costs to stay in business. So, of course, he is going to twist the truth and use scare tactics (in the form of hosts like Bill O'Reiley and Glenn Beck) to keep the populace complacent.

"Medicaid and medicare are a mess. Have you ever been on Medicaid?"

Yes we have and it is wonderful. The only reason that Medicaid and Medicare are a mess is due to a major lack of funding; they consistently have their budgets cut... thus why Medicaid has been forced to stop offering adults any dental and optical coverage. The US government already provides the best health care in the US for government employees and veterans, and the elderly (Medicare). It's cheaper, more efficient and provides a higher level of care than is available through private insurance.

"The US treasurer himself said the bottom line is that Obama's plan will cost $1 T more than taxpayers currently spend!"

Actually government health care has proven to be far cheaper and far more accessible than private. For one, overhead costs would be cut due to reduced staffing needs (administration, billing departments, etc.) than currently exist in hospitals and private health insurance companies. Also, socialized health care is not trying to generate a profit, just break even.

The fact is the US has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, has a lower level of care, lower life expectancy, and has far higher percentage of people without any access to care at all. More people in the United States are totally without access than the entire population of Canada. The US is currently paying out the nose for emergency care when it could be paying far, far less for European/Canadian type preventative care which is far cheaper in the long run for all involved. It's better to have free, easy access to a doctor whenever you need it than to have to wait until it develops into a serious, more expensive, problem to get help.

The way it works in Canada is that you get free access to basic health care, for specialty care you may be caused to wait depending on the status of your condition. If it is life-threatening you get immediate, free treatment. For elective or non-serious conditions you may well have to wait, but that is no different from how triage works in a hospital normally - those who need the care the most get treated first. Dentistry, prescriptions, optometric care are privatized and covered at different degrees depending on the province you reside in, but either way are far, far cheaper than in the US.

"Shouldn't the reform come from insurance companies, the doctors and hospitals who so ridiculously overcharge"

Unfortunately the insurance companies, doctors and hospitals will not reform, especially without government intervention. They are corporations whose primary purpose is to make the most possible money for their shareholders. The best way to drive their prices down is to offer some sort of alternative, where people do not have to pay exorbitant fees in order to receive treatment. Once they start to lose customers they will reform in order to stay in business.

"I have a doctor friend in Switzerland who had to go over the border to practice to make any money, because they were paid the same as every other average doctor, no matter how good they strove to be."

The fact that they weren't making 'any money' is a fallacy, obviously the other doctors in Switzerland are able to survive off of their wages. Another reason this argument is ridiculous is due to the fact that American doctors spend years paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, whereas in a socialized country such as Switzerland their government pays for their college education and doctors graduate debt free.

Under our current system doctors are paid money based on how many patients they can squeeze into a day, to make even more money they are also paid a commission by pharmaceutical companies for each prescription they write. In socialized countries doctors are paid based on how well they care for their patients as well as their patients overall health. In other words our doctors are paid more if we are sick, by being able to write more prescriptions and taking follow up appointments, whereas their doctors are paid more the better their patients fare.

It is irrational that anyone should make a profit on top of what medical care costs. Doctors and nurses should be paid. Pay the costs, but making money on people who are ill is immoral. HMO's and businesses making money on people who are ill are vultures.

"Many people don't have insurance because they choose to spend the money on another area of their life, not that they can't afford it. They just think the government 'owes' this to them. They refuse to get jobs, because then they would have to give up the freebies. I don't want to pay for your health care."

If health care weren't at all tied to employment it would be the same as education - a right that all people (and their children) have regardless of their employment. Are we going to punish children because their parent can't afford health insurance, maybe can't work or even won't?

Many Americans seem to have a warped view on how social programs work. Their anecdotal evidence is a poor reason to go up against the reality of how socialized health care (and education for that matter) actually functions. The percentage of people in the US who abuse social programs, in the 'they' group, are minuscule, especially when compared to how many people in the US are uninsured, uninsurable, and under-insured, and have serious health and employment problems because they are simply less lucky than others. This view seems rather limited and selfish.

"Socialized health care is not only economically unsound, it is immoral. Stealing is wrong, even if it's for a good cause."

'Stealing is wrong.' Yes. So how about industrial waste and environmental degradation that is stealing our health in the first place? How about pesticides and herbicides that are in our food, and all for maximization of profit? Do you realize how much industrialization has increased the cancer rates in developing and developed countries? Causing this whole health care problem in the first place is our particular brand of capitalism.

Do you pay taxes at all? Because that's the government 'stealing' from you, that's forced charity. As the US becomes more and more liberal, which it will, more and more people will start to see why socialism works and will overcome the McCarthyist fear they have of the word socialism. The selfish might, at that time, want to find a nice island to isolate themselves from all the evil forced charity that will be imposed on their 'extremely moral' selves. As for theft, if taxes are theft, then you'd best be prepared to give up much. Police, fire, roads, schools etc.

"The reason health care was so cheap earlier in the last century was because there was less government involvement. Medicare and Medicaid has been a horrible disaster for our country and have increased the cost of health care to what it is today."

As for profit, look back 20 years. Medical care before the rise of the HMO was cheaper, and the people who made money then were doctors, nurses, hospitals, and people doing medical care, not the insurance companies and drug companies. Ask any doctor who has practiced medicine between 1980 and 2009 when and where they made more money. Doctors are making less money now, nurses pay more money for their own insurance (and they work for hospitals and insurance companies.) And people who hold these views obviously don’t have a chronic or debilitating illness or they would understand what it means to be robbed of their money, homes and quality of life.

Things were much simpler in the 'last part of the last century', they have become significantly more complicated by insurance companies. In reality the 'invention' of the HMO may be the most insidious creation ever developed. Insurance companies have developed entire systems and protocols to stop providing for people they insure so that they may retain more 'profit'... the profit of the insurance company is entirely created to decrease the service provided to the insured. If that's not immoral, what is? Health care isn't about simple economics, it’s about quality of life. If quality of life is money to you, then I hope when you snuggle up with it, it gives you lots of warm fuzzies.

"Big government is the problem!"

Back in the day, you had to subscribe for police coverage, fire coverage, and other things that we now consider city costs. How is medical care much different? Everyone in America is one major illness away from bankruptcy, and if you check yourself or a loved one into a nursing/rest home, you can kiss every dime you ever made or ever saved goodbye. And the poor? They already get the best medical coverage in America. Medicaid: The Unlimited Gold Pot at the end of the social ladder.

When a society has its basic needs cared for and doesn't need to struggle to feed their family when making $6 an hour at Mc Donald's, when they don't have to go bankrupt to pay for a surgery, when they can afford to send their children to university, when their government spends money on the welfare of humans and not on imperialistic military goals then you've got a society where social equality is possible, and where people don't die of tooth infections which spread and get into the blood stream because someone couldn't afford to go to the dentist.

"Socialism is nothing more than moral cannibalism. It is evil and it always destroys the people who live with it."

Unfortunately, a Euro/Canadian style health care system isn't even on the table in Congress right now. All they're trying to do is fix the uninsured/under-insured problem by having affordable coverage. Health Insurance companies currently can charge whatever they want and then refuse to pay for people's medical needs because that way they make less money. As long as medical care is for-profit, it is bad for Americans (unless you run a health insurance company). They want to make money, not help people get better.

Obama is not a socialist. He's not even a liberal. He's a centrist. Almost the entire democratic party and certainly its policies are centrist ones. And again Obama's plan isn't socialized medicine. It's just introducing some much needed regulation so insurance can't decline to cover treatment or choose what kinds of treatments it will cover, as well as a public plan which would force insurance companies to lower their rates to a reasonable level. That's all. No socialization, it's American-style health insurance which people will still have to purchase. It's still a terrible idea, but not nearly as terrible as what is currently in place.

Is socialism evil? No, what's evil is basing a society on extreme selfishness, on giving power to those who are just lucky and born into a situation where they can succeed, and where the majority of people exist mostly to supply the ruling class with ever more money. Unregulated capitalism is as bad an idea as Leninist communism. What we need a healthy balance of the two extremes, and that is socialism. Where personal freedom & human equality are sacrosanct.

"Socialism worked real well for the Soviet Union or Cuba or North Korea didn't it?"

Actually if you look at these examples they are not socialists at all, but communists. Communism is no more socialism than American capitalism is Nazism. You live in a society, and must either learn to live with the fact that we as humans are interconnected, need each other, and never succeed in a vacuum. You need us, though because you're just one person, we don't really need you as much. Socialism is a natural result of our basic nature as social primates. If we care for our community, they will in turn care for us and we all profit. What I see as really immoral is the power that rich people have over the poor to control their lives, to refuse them medical treatment, education, and equality simply because they weren't born powerful. All the while American society is becoming more fractured, most are getting poorer, while the few rich are getting even richer, and turning into an oligarchy.

A special thanks to my friends Craig Fitzner, Mark Olsen, Jillian Phippen and Derek Johnson.

Help End The Siege In Gaza

We all know the story of the atrocities committed by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. There is no question that the occupation is illegal, that there have been innumerable human rights violations, that Israel is continuing to build settlements and their apartheid wall is reaching ever farther into Palestinian land. We are going on 60 years now of what most people would consider ethnic cleansing, while the world at large sits idly by unable or unwilling to stand up to the American backed Israeli war machine.

More than 300,000 Israeli settlers are now living on illegal settlements on Palestinian land. It is against international law for an occupying country to transfer it's own civilians into an occupied territory, the same as they also cannot forcibly remove those people inhabiting the occupied territory... but Israel has completely ignored these laws. The Israeli Occupation Authority (IOA) issues demolition orders on Palestinian homes on a daily basis, leaving thousands of refugees. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) then move in with bulldozers and demolish the homes and use the land to build settlements and highways that only settlers are allowed to travel on.

Israel has decided that things such as fruit, shoes and books are "luxuries" that the Palestinian people do not deserve and have effectively blocked these items and many others from entering into the occupied territories. Human rights organizations and even the United Nations are denied access to the Palestinian people, 90% of whom are now suffering from malnutrition. The Palestinian refugees, over half of whom are children, have limited or no access to clean drinking water, health care, education or even food and clothing.

The time is long past that the people of the world need to stand up in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Palestine. Whether or not our individual nations are willing to make a stand against the Israeli government does not dissolve our responsibilities as individuals to do what is right. As is often the case in these matters people are bound to ask themselves what they could possibly do to help others halfway across the world, to justify that their voice and their opinions matter not at all in the great scheme of things, to 'feel bad' for the weak and the oppressed but to do nothing more. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

In exactly this spirit of non-complacency Norman Finkelstein and other prominent activists are enlisting various Palestinian solidarity groups in their planning of an international march on Gaza in an effort to end the blockade of the territory. It is their plan to bring thousands of demonstrators from across the globe to march alongside Gazans as they breach the blockade imposed upon the population together as one people. According to a draft statement of purposes and principles "This march draws inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi. Those of us residing in the United States also draw inspiration from the civil rights movement." According to the statement the march will be set for January 1st, 2010. "We will march the Long Mile across Erez checkpoint alongside the people of Gaza in a nonviolent demonstration that breaches the illegal blockade. We conceive this march as the first step in a protracted nonviolent campaign ... If we bring thousands to Gaza and millions more around the world watch the march on the internet, we can end the siege without a drop of blood being shed."

Regarding the march Finkelstein was quoted as saying "If the likes of Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela are at the head of the march; if behind them are students holding high signs of the schools from which they hail - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge; if behind them are the ill and the lame, the young and the innocent of Gaza; if behind them are hundreds of thousands of others, unarmed and unafraid, wanting only to enforce the law; if around the world hundreds of thousands are watching the internet to see what happens - Israel can't shoot."

My friends and I are planning to form our own delegation to visit Israel and the occupied territories in December and to join in the march on Gaza, to help break the siege and bring this horrible violence and occupation to an end. Please do everything you can to show your support for this worldwide movement by spreading the word, donating to help fund the delegations, or by adding your support and presence to our numbers. If you are interested in joining our delegation or to learn more about what can be done to aid the Palestinian people, please feel free to e-mail me at Crystal.HighRoad@Gmail.Com

The Fall Of An Empire

The hottest new host on Fox News this year, Glenn Beck, has launched The 9-12 Project, a site dedicated to sharing core principles and values that Americans are said to live by.The website defines essential American qualities such as believing in god, being opposed to income tax, being pro marriage (as long as your straight) and many other gems.

Beck claims that The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked when we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the "greatest nation ever created".
It’s really just more of the same that we’ve seen from the hard right recently, the whole "Socialism is bad, our money is being stolen for us, Barack is a Communist, etc." While some of those points might be true, what they continue to overlook is that Bush created the mess the country is in today, and Bush was the one that ran up the foreign debt and started the bailouts. But no, it’s only bad now a new, black guy takes over the mess.

In the show launching the The 9-12 Project, Beck interviewed Chuck Norris, who earlier this year said that thousands of militia were preparing for a military takeover of the United States. If that doesn’t say batshit crazy, I’m not sure what else can.
Here is a list of Beck's 9 principles that he is telling Americans from all walks of life that they should live by:

The 9 Principles

1. America Is Good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
If, like me, you find this to all be some kind of tripped out right wing nut jobs brain fart, there is another way. Davis Fleetwood, a political comedian and in my opinion, true genius, came up with his own project, The 9/10 Project. Fleetwood's project asserts that the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the coordinated terror tactics of the U.S. Federal government in the months and years following have had the intended effect of turning the populace of the United States into a herd of servile, submissive stooges.
The 9/10 Project is a movement for those individuals who acknowledge that the United States is still, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “The Greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and who are opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.The 9/10 Project acknowledges that the United States of America is now an EMPIRE and we all know that empires fall, that's just how it is. Rather than wage endless wars to remain king of the hill, The 9/10 Project favors the peaceful break-up of the United States of America.

The 9/10 Project is for citizens of the world who have borne witness to the growing imperial reach of the United States in the post 9/11 era and have reached the only logical conclusion one came come to "the long-term survival of the human species requires the United States of America to dismantle peacefully and immediately". We acknowledge that the founding fathers were certainly “on to something” but it is time to hit the reset button. Small is the new big.

The 9/10 Project asserts that if we American citizens continue to pursue the “rags to riches” myth of the American Dream we do so at our own peril. We do so willfully ignoring the dark underbelly of said dream that lurks like a storm cloud in the form of a sense of entitlement bloated to the point of bursting as if on steroids. A sense of entitlement that we can, literally and figuratively, no longer afford. A sense of entitlement that has us clawing and scratching our way through our pathetic little existence. In a culture of competition that has backed us into a corner the only escape from which seems to be more competition, more violence; or borrowing from another Peter to pay off another Paul and for what?

So we Americans can remain blithely ignorant between the direct connections that links the blood soaked desserts of the Middle East and our beloved S.U.V.’s and McMansions with newly remodeled kitchens ready for a photo spread in Martha Stewart Living? Really? Is that where we are on the evolutionary scale?

The 9-10 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were before 9/11: when the liberal intellectual elite in the U.S. was not afraid to declare loud and clear that is was ashamed of its government. A time when a culture war held the promise of cleaving a wedge between those of us truly on the left and the gun show loving Glen Beck apostles that make Fox News a profitable network.

Here are the 9/10 projects 9 basic principles:

1. (The United States of) America is BAD.

2. Face it, GOD is a lie. However… if, in fact, there is a CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE, she/he certainly did not write a book of laws for us to live by.

GOD George W. Bush claimed, many times, to be in dialogue with, and take guidance from, God. If he had said he took guidance from Tinker bell, it would have turned into a national emergency, or at the very least, a ratings monster of a reality television program. Rational individuals and mathematicians everywhere know that existence of Tinkerbell is just as likely as the existence of an all knowing creator who wrote the best selling book of all time… Furthermore, those daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. America’s war on terror is finally being revealed for what it really is: a Jihad.

3. Fair trade! Show me a human who can spend an hour in WAL-MART or TARGET and emerge without blood on their hands and I will show you an honest human.

Honesty I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. But the finely woven fabric (created by cheap child labor in some country with dark skinned children and faces covered in dust) of the Mossimo® Ripstop Cargo Short” just speaks to me in a way that says: Summer! Plus, my calves look great in them AND (omg!) I got 20% off because I opened a new Target charge account.

4. Gay marriage? Sure it should be legal. However, be careful what you wish for. The family is not “sacred”; it is one of their most powerful traps.

Marriage is one of the more powerful trap’s exalted by the religious right that keeps us is subservience to a make believe God, an economy that relies on you spinning your wheels in the rat race, and a government that aims to control you. By all means, marry if you must, but when the moon is full and the mood strikes you, feel free to go and rape your slave women. Or slave men. Depending on your orientation. Whatever. It is all good, and those high yellow kids are so cute and make great clothing models for Benetton.

5. Laws were meant to be broken.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Justice is blind is a great slogan invented by Madison Avenue geniuses employed to keep people with their heads down and doing what they are told. Why? The trust funds, Heidi Fleiss harems, dinner reservations at The French Laundry, and other “rights and privileges” enjoyed by the wealthiest 1% are predicated on a massive and sustained outbreak of fear. Are they scared enough yet, or do we need to see some more towers come down, bitches?!?!

6. “The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a sham of historical proportions the consequences of which gave rise to death, incarceration, and the popularity of Glenn Beck.”

“The basic credo of the American way of life is encapsulated in that tidy and well sounding phrase ‘I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ With that as a scoring rubric, the U.S.A. puts the F back in Fantastic Fucking Failure.

A: Life.

Fact:
22,000 Americans died last year from lack of health insurance. Not because they were sick, but 22,000 dead because they had no insurance. The number of Canadians, and citizens of Europe who died from lack of health care insurance, last year: ZERO.

B: Liberty.

Fact:
The USA incarcerates 2.3 million prisoners at a (2006) rate of 738 per 100,000. For China, the rate is 118 prisoners per 100,000 people less than one sixth the rate in “the land of the free.” No other country comes close to the American rate of incarceration. Are American Citizens that bad?

C: The pursuit of happiness

Fact:
The United States ranks 23^rd on the “happy planet index”. Above the so-called best country in the world include such smaller, socialist leaning countries as Denmark, Switzerland, and France.

7. I work just as hard as the average CEO. It is only the arbitrary criteria set by the ruling class that smiles benevolently on the fact that corporate CEO’s earn, on average, 543 times that of the average worker.

Equity “If we are to be truly free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained we must engage in Non-violent, meme warfare that would end the U.S.A.

8. It is not Un-American to assert that America must cease to exist.

Dissent “If there should come a time when the only hope for the survival of the American dream is the destruction of the nation that gave birth to her, then matricide is indeed a form of patriotism.” – Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father.

9. Fuck Wall Street, but make love to Mother Nature.

“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues” – Dr. Suess, The Lorax

While Fleetwood's 9-10 project may seem extreme to some it actually draws the logical conclusions that mankind will eventually come to: that the American project has failed and it is time to move on to something better. America has become an empire and, unfortunately, all empires are destined to fall. The fall of this evil machine will inevitably take one of two forms: either enough people will wake up from the junk food and television induced god-fearing coma that most Americans live their lives in, learn to think on their own, and rise up against the powers that be in revolution or in the not too distant future we will have exploited and abused one population to many and the world themselves will tear us to shreds like a pack of ravenous wolves.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On December 10th, 1948 the United Nations put forth The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states that as human beings we are all equal and posses certain inalienable rights. Human dignity is the very essence of global peace and justice. Virtually every atrocity committed by humankind has been a direct result of a blatant disregard of certain inalienable rights. This is why they must be protected by rule of law.

The declaration consists of 30 articles. Articles one and two state that we all share equal rights and dignity and that we are born free. Articles three through eleven talk about rights that belong to everyone such as life, security, and liberty. They also state that we are free from slavery, torture, or any other kind of degrading and dehumanizing treatment. Articles twelve through seventeen are about the rights that we are to be granted in civil society. These rights include the freedom of movement, political asylum, the right to marry and start a family, and the right to own property. Articles eighteen through twenty one are about our political and religious rights. These include our right to free speech and expression, the right to an opinion, the right to choose and practice religion and the right to take part in democracy, whether it be elections or directly. Articles twenty two through twenty seven are our social, cultural, and economic rights. These rights include the right to employment, fair pay, unions, education, and cultural society. In the concluding articles, twenty eight through thirsty, everything is tied together with our responsibility to the United Nations, our society as a whole, and to each other.

For a school project this previous semester I decided that I wanted to visit each of the high schools in Utah County to find out if they were teaching their students about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I naturally assumed that they were not as I had never heard of it before being well into my college experience. I visited with a variety of principals, vice principals and history teachers to investigate their curriculum. At each school I explained to them why the Declaration was so important and exactly why it should be taught in our public schools. I gave each school a sample lesson about the UDHR as well as created large laminate copies of the Declaration that I asked them to hang in their school for the students to review - as most schools do with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. I found a variety of responses ranging from people asking me to come in and help teach it to the students, to one vice principal telling me that I was obviously a lesbian who was trying to sneak in material promoting gay rights.

I chose this project because of my deep love and appreciation of human rights. I believe very strongly that all human beings are born equal and free and are guaranteed certain inalienable rights that can never be taken from them. Some may criticize the declaration claiming that it is based on a western way of thinking, that it’s partisan and not suitable or relevant to all cultures. I disagree with these statements. The declaration is a product of a group of eighteen individuals who all came from very different backgrounds, regions, legal traditions and religions. These eighteen individuals were seeking a “common standard of achievement” that we could all share that would secure a “higher standard of life”. I believe that what they created was a beautiful canvas of interdependent liberties and social responsibilities.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Eleanor Roosevelt who was the chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and a staunch supporter of the declaration. She stated that "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere." Where are these small places close to home where we go to seek equal opportunity and dignity? I believe that these places are our schools. It states in the preamble of the declaration that we will “keep this Declaration constantly in mind”, that we “shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms”. It is our responsibility as a nation to uphold these promises that we have made to future generations.

Our educational system is failing our children. I never so much as saw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights until I was a junior in college. Not only had I not seen the declaration but I was never even taught about the concept of human rights, this is a travesty. How is it that I knew the histories of every great war and violent conflict but I had never been taught about my basic rights and freedoms? As a mother I am saddened and frustrated at our shortcomings as a society. I strongly believe that if we want a peaceful society we have to work for it and the best place to start is by teaching our children that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”. It is only through teaching our children love and respect for all mankind that we can ever hope to obtain a peaceable world.

It is one of my greatest desires to change the way our children are being taught about the world they live in and their place in it. Getting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights taught in our schools is just my first step towards that goal. I believe that introducing the declaration will open a whole new door in our children's education and way of thinking that will forever change the way we view each other as human beings. This project was an amazing experience for me and I am now working with the Utah Board Of Education to make sure that human rights become a part of our children's core curriculum.