An Important Step in the Right Direction
- With all that technical stuff out of the way, everyone should take a second to recognize how significant this is.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first international document dictating the basic rights of all people, all over the world.
- The Magna Carta was pretty important, and so was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
- And, oh, yeah, the Bill of Rights was a big deal, too.
- But this declaration encompasses all of us, for the first time in human history.
- That's super impressive considering these 58 countries encompass different places and different mindsets.
- One could (kind of) thank the rise of fascism for giving the world the push to create something like this, which supports the U.N. Charter to "lift men everywhere to a higher standard of life and to a greater enjoyment of freedom." (48)
- Gladstone Murray was the chief of Canadian Broadcasting, and he said that while men (and women) aren't perfect, it doesn't matter as long as everyone keeps trying to make things better.
- We're all "fundamentally a moral being [...]. No man is by nature simply the servant of the state or of another man." (51, 53)
- In other words, we're not all that different from one another, and true freedom is something we all deserve.
- All people need to be guaranteed certain freedoms in order to better themselves, and while we all still have lots of work to do to make that happen, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good start.