The Champions of Human Rights Everywhere But Home

In the United States, human rights violations are something many consider to be faced by other people in other countries, not by people here at home.

        While our government pounds its chest, championing human rights around the globe, need we look no further than Newark, Oakland, New York, Chicago, or even next door or across the street.

We demand sanctions on the governments in countries around the world for supposedly violating the human and civil rights of their people. We have gone to war and shed blood, lost lives in the name of human rights. We have kidnapped, jailed and even attempted assassinations of leaders in sovereign nations for supposed human rights violations. 

Does anyone think that maybe we need to shovel the shit out of our own backyard? Something that becomes incredibly difficult when you're standing chin deep about to suffocate in it. 

In Bangladesh, a factory collapsed killing hundreds of workers. U.S. companies, from Benetton to Wal-Mart--who obviously put profit before safety--are now trying to back away as the death toll reaches over 500. So far eight people have been arrested and charged with death by negligence. 

Meanwhile, here at home at least 13 people were killed and about 200 more injured in a massive explosion and fire at a fertilizer plant in West Texas. The explosion  just about leveled an entire town. The fertilizer plant was fined $2,300 by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 for failing to have a risk management plan that met federal standards, according to the EPA. Yet they never went back to inspect. No one has been arrested or charged in what certainly looks like profit before safety… death by negligence. Yet the owners are commended for cooperating.

"Hearing" vs. "Listening" :  Are our elected officials hard of hearing?  Not likely, they are more likely hard of caring… 

 
 There is a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is simply the act of perceiving sound by the ear, and if you are not hearing-impaired, hearing simply happens. Listening, however, is something you consciously choose to do. Listening requires concentration so that your brain processes meaning from words and sentences. 

Most government officials tend to be "hard of listening" and hard of caring, rather than "hard of hearing." Listening may lead to learning and they are just not interested in learning or caring what the people say they want or need.

I believe that this description is inclusive of the media… right, left or indifferent, elected officials, all branches of government, including the Supreme Court.  Government officials hear the people who have elected them to office, the media hears the discontent with the contents of their reporting--or lack there of--from the people who read/watch the news. And the Supreme Court, I just don't have words for their "constitutional"lack… They are all simply just refusing to "listen," and the recent state of affairs in this country--the sequester--leaves little doubt that they just don't care.

Not one CEO or CFO of the "too large too fail" banks have been charged with the lying and theft that lead to the failure of the economy, or of the illegal foreclosures that left thousand of families destitute.  Nor has anyone in the Bush administration been held accountable for the deaths of thousands of people in two unnecessary wars.

As government officials make their global trot decrying violations of human rights while ignoring those same infractions in their own backyards, it's no wonder Ronald Reagan, who made callousness fashionable, has become the icon to so many of them. He, too, could hear, but was a master of not listening and not caring…