SubscribeThere has been a lot of talk about rights lately, and rightly so. The main right we're seeing in action is the right of the public to congregate and peacefully voice their dissent.
Check out Andrew Napolitano's Daily Show Interview here.
Among other things, he says, "We are born free. We have natural rights granted by virtue of our humanity, and government essentially negates those rights."
I have several problems with this thesis. The first is that we are not born free. In truth, we are all born into a society, which essentially means that our freedoms are limited by the freedoms of others in the society. My freedom ends when it infringes on the freedom of someone else. This is the fundamental limitation that we are born into.
The second problem I have is that of natural rights. We have no natural rights, as such, because we are born into a system. It is this system itself that grants us these rights. Remember that our ancestors created these rights precisely because they were systematically oppressed. It is times such as this that we must continue to recreate them. That's why OWS is so important--it's an attempt to point out that our political clout as Res Publica is weak and that we need to assert our rights. We created our rights, but they need the occasional bit of maintenance.
The third problem I have is that he's not entirely wrong. The government does negate the rights it grants. Look at UC Davis. Here we have students and faculty who have payed to be on campus or are public employees using the public space on the university. The chancellor of the school calls the cops to disperse the crowd, the cops use pepper spray to remove about 10 people. Note that the type of pepper spray the cop used has a wide blast radius and affected many of the surrounding crowd. Apparrently, it's a type of pepper spray that's supposed to be used over a large crowd and from a distance, not to be used from 2 feet away and sprayed directly into the face. Those people had a right to be there, doing what they were doing. In truth, the cops should have been facing the other direction, protecting the rights of those protesters.
Essentially, what happened at UC Davis was a case where the Executive branch of our government came into conflict with our legislative branch, albeit with a delay. Remember that the only power any of us have to make changes to our society is a vote. The lag time between an event like that at UC Davis and our ability to vote in a number of officials who will change our circumstances is huge. It may not happen this year or the next. At most, our civil power is limited to changing things indirectly and too late. This lag time is probably for the better in that it gives us time to think of how things should be different, but it's painful in the meantime.
I see OWS as a symptom of combinations of the lag time between vote currency and political action, high unemployment, lack of direct participation in democracy, an equal system that produces inequality, and the fast transfer of ideas. It seems to be a group of people who think that their votes don't do much, who would like to work to re-pay student loans and mortgages, who want to participate in government to help build the world they want to live in, who realize that equal exchanges in the market don't always produce equal market status, and who realize that ideas are infectious and powerful.
As a bonus, check out a talk by Slavoj Zizek on OWS at St. Mark's Bookstore, NYC.