Human rights depend on what you don't do

 Yesterday marked seventy-six years since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Growing up -- or at least going through childhood -- in the 1960s, I saw human rights advancing all around me, and it seemed great. It was great. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a threat to human survival. But the thing that struck me most was that the drive toward greater human freedom depended not on what we do, on extra efforts, as much as what we don't do. 

Oppressing people is hard work. Its proponents will say that it is necessary to control bad elements that need to be suppressed. It creates jobs for people who will administer controlling agencies and do the actual contact work of whipping and beating the disobedient. But for the average citizen, it's really less effort to relax and let the oppressed rise and mingle.

There are a lot of weird people in the world. They dress funny, speak unintelligibly, eat strange food that might smell yucky. Some of them worship deities that don't play nicely with others. Universal acceptance of each other requires every disparate group to examine its beliefs and trim away the ones that call for friction. That may seem like an effort, but it's still subtracting actions from a daily routine.

Your threshold of weirdness may be high or low. We all have our comfort zones. We all have varied tolerance for pushing the edges of them. The solution to human conflict is simple, but not easy. If you have to spend a lot of time well centered in your comfort zone, that's fine. But to maintain the rights of all, you have to let the adventurous fringe members of your comfort group explore and blend, stitching together the seams of a quilt of humanity that is stronger and cozier together than it is in tatters.

The first and greatest commandment is "Thou shalt lighten up."

Extra effort has been required over the decades since 1948 and the 1960s, because so many people can't bring themselves to lighten up. We have depended on the sacrifices of activists, including their actual deaths at the hands of angry bigots who can't stop making the extra effort to hate and fight. It has been a shoving match because the hardworking oppressors have made it into one, and recruit generation after generation to keep working harder than they have to in service to this drive for inequality.