Blogs

July 23, 2023

The discussion in one of my classes today was about human rights. The student was an older Japanese woman. She is taking classes to prepare to get work in a field different from the one she works in now. The instructor in one of her classes asked her to define human rights; she couldn’t do it.

Even after I located and shared this website with her–https://hrbaportal.org/list-of-human-rights

—she couldn’t talk about human rights.

She said that the Japanese language made it very difficult to discuss human rights.

I haven’t studied Japanese, so I don’t know if this is so or not.

However, her question made me wonder if language is a barrier to adding what might be new ideas to a culture.

In 1948, one of the things that happened was world leaders deciding on the basic rights of all humans. This was done largely in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Some of those rights are that every human has a name. Recall that prisoners of the Holocaust were given numbers instead of names.

Some other rights are the right to an education, the right to move or travel, the right to health care.

I have many thoughts from this class.

One of them is that a copy of this website needs to be sent to every elected official and employee in Washington and all the states.

Recent news indicates that many have forgotten the rights that were agreed upon at the end of World War 11.

So, I feel good about me because I have reminded myself of my rights as a human.