Whose Rights Are These, Anyway?

Summary: One of the hallmarks of growing up as part of the Boomer generation is that our education centered primarily around two general concepts: That the United States was the greatest country in the world, and that we were the champions of freedom around the world. These concepts came out of a shell-shocked vision that needed to somehow justify not only the number of lives lost in World War II but also the ongoing actions in Korea and Vietnam that took lives without quite so clearly defining why we were there in the first place. Our parents and grandparents felt a need to instill in us the idea that we, more than any other country in the world, had saved the planet from Fascism, and that we, more than any other country in the world, were free to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want. Freedom was a big word that carried a lot of emotion. When we would study history, comparisons were made between ancient cultures and the freedom of the contemporary United States. When we would study other contemporary cultures, direct lines were drawn between their difficulties and the lack of freedom their people had. Over and over, we were told that it was our freedoms, as outlined in the Articles of the Constitution, that set us apart and made us superior to every other country in the world. No one else even came close. That line of teaching worked through elementary school with little difficulty, but by the time we became teenagers, and definitely, as we entered high school, the flaws in that freedom theory started becoming evident. The high school imposed a dress code. Hey, aren’t we free to wear what we want? School administrators closed the campus so that students couldn’t run to a local drive-in for lunch. Hey, aren’t we free to eat where we wish? Then, they started assigning parking spots for those who drove to school, issuing tickets if you weren’t in your assigned spot, or possibly marking you absent! We were sure that our freedoms were being violated by those rules! What we couldn’t see at the time was that administrators had reasons for each of those decisions. I’m not saying they were all good reasons, but they were present. The dress code was implemented out of fear of gang activity present in a neighboring school system. The closed campus was the result of students being involved in multiple accidents during the lunch period. The assigned parking spots made it easier to know if, when, and who was slipping away from campus and skipping class during the day. From the perspective of the school’s administrators, they were doing their job in keeping us safe. From the perspective of students, each new rule violated yet another right. Looking back now, the entire debate seems rather trivial. If gangs were going to divide the school, uniforms wouldn’t have stopped them. Students were still hurt in accidents, just not during the lunch period. Plenty of kids found ways to skip class without moving their cars. I might have been one of them. No one’s activities were being curtailed to any point of personal detriment. What that environment did, however, was created in our generation a sense that we had to ferociously, continually, adamantly, defend our rights, both real and imagined, against every manner of attempt to truncate them through one method or another. We argued about what the government did. We argued about what the government wasn’t doing. Sadly, what we never really understood was that personal rights are only one part of a larger equation. And while my parents were persistent in teaching that with all those rights came both specific and implied responsibilities, not everyone got those lessons, and even fewer passed them down to the next generation....

Whose Rights Are These, Anyway?

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