‘Natural’ Rights

Rights and responsibilities

may structure freedom,

but they may also be forms

of political enclosure,

of who is out

and who is in –

and how much in.

Rights and responsibilities

in this sense

are forms

of regulation and coercion,

often based

on an a priori

and unprovable

natural law,

of how things ‘naturally’ are,

like the once upon a time

God-given divine right of kings

eventually inherited by a larger group

of certain men – men deemed ‘white’ –

notably

during times of slavery in America

and throughout colonizations

across globe,

‘natural’ rights at some point,

at least in abstract,

growing to include

blacks and women

and now many other identities.

Clearly, the ‘advance’

has been fraught with misuse,

the concept of

rights coupled with responsibilities

used to justify

second class standing

of those ‘granted’ equality,

post-civil war blacks

deemed not ready or able –

due to rationalizations

ranging from poor temperament

to lack of education or intelligence –

to fully assume

their individual social duties.

More, because emancipated blacks

were now deemed to have failed

in their obligations as free men,

they were now placed

in a constant condition

of blameworthiness,

and thus always

under a now-legitimized threat

of punishment.

And blacks to this day,

due to such self-fulfilling

false and systemically-enforced

prophecies and rationales,

are ‘in’, but not really in,

largely free only

to be punished

for not meeting

their ‘obligations’.

No matter how crucial

the essentially ungrounded

and uneven process

of advancing rights and justice

has been,

something is being elided over:

how we should treat each other

and how we should live together

and why.

Isn’t the concept of ‘natural law’,

used to justify every inequality

for thousands of years,

and now continuing to do so

precisely under the imprimatur

of equality,

a poor substitute

for the creative act of communing –

in unbounded awareness

of one another –

to invoke, in ongoing creative process,

a living, thriving community

of equality, support

and decency?