[Oe List ...] Jaime's Monday reflection

[SVESjaime at aol.com]

Responses to my musing on Mumbai last Monday included requests to send any 
further Sunday 'stream of consciousness' reflections.   Here's one that will be 
on the Monday Saipan Tribune (those uninterested, move on; those curious, my 
pleasure):

UDHR and the Lord of the Flies

Ruth Tighe castigates herself for failing to commemorate Constitution Day in 
light of her annual reminder that the Commonwealth seemed to have forgotten 
the significance of the day.   

I plead ditto for failing to mark the 60th year anniversary of the UN's 
Universal Declaration on Human Rights last week.   I intended to attend the 
scheduled mass at the Chalan Kanoa Cathedral if only to lend support to an 
understanding that the United States fostered and Eleanor Roosevelt so persistently 
promoted sixty years ago, but priorities shifted by the end of the day.

The eloquent simplicity of the Declaration's language makes its civilizing 
intent unmistakable, and has made it the most translated document in the world.  
 It begins and lays out a fundamental structure of establishing human 
relations, and the universal measure to gauge the conduct of the individual and 
society and vice-versa.

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable 
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, 
justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous 
acts, which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world 
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from 
fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common 
people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a 
last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights 
should be protected by the rule of law, …

It was meant to be an antidote to the vagaries of war and the periodic 
emergence of Hitlers in the world.   Sixty years later, certain characters have 
become familiar around the dining table:   Pol Pot of Cambodia and Pinochet of 
Chile, Milosevic of Serbia and Marcos of the Philippines, the Korean father-son 
duo and the Talibans of Afghanistan, to name a few.   We have become inured to 
human rights violations; we readily dismiss out of our consciousness the 
reminders that groups like Falun Dafa foist on us during Saipan's Thursday street 
market.   Tibet and Myanmar are places elsewhere, and we do not see ourselves 
in Darfur or Rwanda, Palestine and Chetnya.   And we pray, inspite of the 
evidence, that the White House did not countenance the use of torture in its 
counterterrorism measures, let alone, order the practice from the Oval Office!

It is ironic that in some quarters, the insistence on human rights is viewed 
as the source of many of the world's current evils (from UK's NewStatesman).   
I would dismiss this as propaganda except that I heard it expressed locally 
by a prominent long-term Saipan resident Hongkong-Guangzhou originating Chinese 
businessman who decried any insinuation that the garment industry, the CNMI 
and China, violated workers human rights.   Besides, he seriously added, how 
about the human rights of the industry's owners and administrators?

Of course, any attempt to document violations of human rights in these 
western Pacific islands, is perceived as an intrusion into indigenous rights.   Our 
former lady teacher in Rota who felt compelled to flee the islands due to 
threats on her family and her person just because she pointed to such violations 
in the early 90s has since become a persona non grata in some powerful quarters 
in Saipan.   A tandem couple, law practitioners who helped me understand the 
legal situation of labor and immigration in the Commonwealth early on, left 
for fear of their family's safety and wellbeing.   The few politicians who are 
seen in the same room with human rights' advocates are instantly vilified for 
betraying the cause of those who elected them into office.

My sixth grade students have been watching scenes of wildlife behavior among 
animals and plants as part of their Science curriculum, and what is evident in 
the food chain is the unmistakable vulnerability of the weak against the 
survival instinct of the strong.   That seems to be Mother Nature's way.   But in 
scientific classification, we are called homo sapiens for our alleged natural 
capacity to learn from experience, for a faculty of reason.   In that sense, 
our progeny in the mammalian class stand a vertebral head above everyone's 
shoulder.

Lead that to the study of Ancient Civilization and one can discern two 
opposing yet simultaneously operating forces - the law of brute force and Empire, 
and the rule of law and the civilizing process.   One can trace the adherence to 
the rule of law from Hammurabi, Moses and Cyrus in Mesopotamia, to the 
English, American and French Bill of Rights of the last two centuries.   But the 
trail on brute force, sanctified in religious sacrifices and divine dictums, 
polished in the technological innovation of the chariot to today's weapons of mass 
destruction, rationalized in the defense posture of Mycenea and Sparta to the 
marching cadence of Caesars and the Roman Empire to the apocalyptic maneuvers 
of the architects of the War on Terror on Pennsylvania Avenue, and we begin 
to understanding how the 50-some unanimous infant voices of the United Nations 
(well, the USSR and South Africa understandably did not oppose but abstained) 
60 years ago was but a feeble cry in the din of humankind's inhumanity to its 
kind.   Vigilance in this instance, is undeniably a supreme virtue.

British writer Sir William Golding would allegorize such opposing forces in 
his novel, The Lord of the Flies, the title being a direct reference to 
Mesopotamia's Beelzebub of satanic pedigree.   My class got to view the 90s film 
version of the novel about a group of young American military cadets stranded 
after a plane crash in one of the Caribbean islands.   What stood out was the 
choice in any given crisis of reverting to our basic animal and survival 
instincts, or on our consciousness of self-directed limits and possibilities of law and 
order, manners and etiquette.

Greek Nikos Kazantsakis elevated that telling in his celebrate Homeric “
Warriors of God,” where he used the metaphor of a crimson line ascending in the 
evolutionary trail of human consciousness while an equal force of descent occurs 
as well.   But our sixth graders know that: Luke Skywalker always contends 
with Darth Vader!

The incidence of bullies and cowed 'weaklings' is not foreign to classrooms.  
 Nor is defiance and rebellion, or simply the impulse to destroy, too 
advanced for my 11-13 year olds.   And hardly are the boys to be excused for their 
machismotic treatment of girls, just because there is prevailing a cultural 
inequity in gender treatment.   If my class is a microcosm of society, then the 
battle between the rule of the jungle and the rule of civilization persists as 
an endless conflict in every social unit, down to each individual, on the 
planet earth.

As to Ruth Tighe's failure to wave her CNMI flag on Constitution Day, we 
shall forgive her for us long as she keeps reminding us to check on the 
Congressional Record, and to alert us on provisions of the law pertinent to our social 
situation.   

And in this Christian Advent season, and vaguely in a season of Hope in Gaia 
with a possible establishment of a US Department of Peace to oversee State, 
Defense and Homeland Security, might I be forgiven my failure to pause to beat 
the drums of the UDHR birthday if I continue to pursue the advent of a world in 
which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from 
fear and want one sixth grader, one classroom day at a time?



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