"No reason to get excited"
The thief, he kindly spoke
--Bob Dylan
The world keeps turning and time slips past. Recently The Harborside Inn on Block Island, where I worked for a bit 44 years ago, burned, and it is now in the process of being torn down. I won’t see it again. In the spring of 1979 Dick Sheridan and I wallpapered each and every room of that hotel. Dick is probably gone now, too. He was sixty-something years old then and I lost track of him in 1984. I didn’t recognize the owner’s name when it was reported on the news, though in 1979 it was owned by Alan and Sharon Pratt. Time marches along. A few days ago, while unpacking a box of old papers I came upon a black and white photo I took of Marsha using Tri-X in an Olympus SLR. In it she is sitting on the steps of an antique store in Allston, in 1982. She is beautiful and behind her you can see up Harvard Ave, looking toward Brookline. I haven’t seen her in nearly four decades and I have not forgotten her. I drove past that corner a few weeks ago and very little is the same. Nothing is permanent. Everything is always in motion and always changing. Living with time, I have come to understand, is like being hit by a big wave while body surfing. It is best to not fight it, to just let go and allow myself to be swept along.
It wouldn’t be human, though, to never look back. To never reminisce, never finger the past with wonder and regret. I think that’s how we are wired and sometimes it staggers me to think that the Steely Dan album I was listening to in 1977 (and still listen to) is as old, now, as Cab Calloway belting “Minnie the Moocher” was then. Amazing. Led Zepplin is too old for mere oldies radio. Oldies is Michael Jackson and Soundgarden and Four Non Blondes. Led Zepplin? Classic rock.
So it is natural to be wistful about time slipping away. There are many things I miss, but have had to let go of. One of these is: What it means to have rights.
When I was a child and most of the adults made sense, there seemed to be an understanding about what rights are. Boiled down to the most basic level, my understanding of rights was: You have the right to keep what is yours and to act without anyone’s permission. Of course, it was understood that this only extended so far as whatever you did, it did not infringe upon the rights of anyone else. You do you, and I’ll do me. You have complete sovereignty over you and yours, and I of me and mine. Period. Full stop.
Rights protected us, insulated us from those who would lay claim to and take our time, our property, or our money, and the government’s job was to safeguard those rights.
At some point (and likely very gradually) over the last half century, as I grew old, this understanding appears to have vanished. Many people now seem to think our rights are gifts from authority. For example: It is now just assumed that we have the right as Americans to own guns only because the Constitution says we have that right, and were it not delineated in the 2nd amendment there would be no such privilege. This seems pretty crazy to me, because in my childhood guns were featured in the Sears Roebuck catalog. My understanding of rights was (and is) that of course people are free to own weapons and wear them on their hips if they so choose, so long as they do not use these weapons to infringe upon the rights of anyone else. My neighbor can own a cannon and it’s none of my business, so long as he doesn’t point it at my house or scare the dogs overmuch. (The dogs absolutely hate loud noises. Smoo, the chihuahua, hides in the shower during thunderstorms and fireworks.)
I’m no manner of Constitutional scholar and possess only a rudimentary understanding of law, but I’m pretty facile with the English language. What this means is crystal clear: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
It says, quite plainly in my estimation, that the purpose of government is to protect the individual liberty of those governed, using powers freely given by the governed.
That ship seems to have sailed. Flipping through a news feed today I find references to gun rights, the right to housing, abortion rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, consumer rights, intellectual property rights, education rights, the right to feel safe, even bragging rights. This seems way, way, way over-complicated to me. The intent was that you have the right to do any damn thing you choose so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of anyone else. What is hard about this?
Here’s the sticking point, I think, and where the tracks veered from any course I recognize. Today rights are perceived not as something every human is born with, but rather as something every human should have. These are not the same thing. In fact, it is a total perversion. It alters the meaning of “right” from absolute autonomy, something every human is born with, to a set of things that can be altered, given or removed, by fate, circumstance, or government. Because people are confused and think rights come from outside of themselves, they also believe that government should dispense anything that is considered a right. Naming something, anything at all apparently, a “right” today makes it a thing the government must then provide. If one has the right to, say, housing, it only follows that an obligation falls to Someone Else to provide this housing. Who is this Someone Else? Do his or her rights not matter?
Here’s the rub. That someone else is you and I. And, no, our rights, as rights were understood, do not matter.
The nation has become simple-minded about this, so that when the right we demand be provided is something we approve of, we happily ignore the fact that to see this right manifest we are discarding the concept of personal liberty. We tend to only notice the violation when it is for something we do not like. As a thought experiment, imagine two scenarios. In the first, someone suggests that every child has the right to a computer, internet access, and books. We gladly turn a blind eye to the fact that someone else will have to have their rights violated in order to pay for these dispensations, whether they want to or not. In the second, someone proposes that every child has the right to be trained in the use of firearms and has the right to have one provided. Then, many would balk, but for the wrong reasons. Each proposal should equally fill us with horror, by the old standard of what “right” meant, but they do not. Because we, all of us, have happily confused coercion with charity.
As I’ve said, I’m getting old and this contest, if it was ever fought, is long over. What is perfectly clear to me seems to be opaque to many around me. This is okay. The world doesn’t stand still because I want it to and humans will continue to do what they have always done. No point in being crazy about it. There is an old saying that goes something like, “No one truly dies until the last living person has forgotten them.” I figure freedom is like that, too. One day, not so many years from now, the last American who remembers freedom—who was able to live a childhood outdoors, unsupervised, until the street lights came on; who was able to hitch-hike coast to coast; who was able to move out at seventeen and reinvent himself without a social media footprint; who was able to hold an opinion without fear of being canceled—will be gone and the actual definition of “right” will finally be buried in bureaucratic legalese. But it, the actual thing, natural rights, will still be there. Rights will sit quietly, chafing in the back of every young mind while humanity makes the same mistakes again and again, patiently waiting for the next group of youngsters to discover freedom again, as they did in 1776. On the day the passage I quoted from The Declaration of Independence was drafted, James Monroe was 18 years old. Alexander Hamilton and Nathan Hale were 21. Thomas Jefferson was 33. Hancock was 39. Time passes. It will happen again.
The battle may be lost and it might be generations before natural rights are understood and embraced again, but time is long. We all get to see only a very small slice of it. I’m grateful for the time I’ve had and will have, to have been here, then, when we were taught and would often say, “I hate what you say but will defend with my life your right to say it.”
It was a very good time. Those of us who remember caught a fine slice of time to be alive in.
I became a grandfather last month and I wonder what the world will look like when my grandson is the age I am now, in 2088. Will any of the understanding we had, of freedom and of rights, remain? I don’t know. But I intend to tell him about freedom and responsibility, Steely Dan, Coltrane, and riding life like a wave. It is both the least and the best I can do.
Peace.
Someday, a book that contains a collection of your observations and explanations may be just as significant as "1984" or "Animal Farm" has been for our generation.
For decades, public schools have provided students with a "Students' Rights and Responsibilities Handbook" hoping to establish some framework for the conduct of the students. I am not sure that has been a resounding success.
As you explain, the concept of "rights" has been so twisted and abused that the original meaning is lost. Society today wants unlimited rights with no responsibilities, and a leftist government is all too eager to take advantage of that social norm.
Well they are trying their hardest to put anyone who thinks they have rights in their place. I believe the goal is to take weapons away little by little like the frog in the pot. So you are probably 100% correct that at some point the younger people will rise again.