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Right, or Wrong?

Expectations are high. We live on a landscape of self-indulgence, quite happily sitting on the fruits of thousands of years of social evolution, technological/scientific discovery, and economical aggregation. Those that lived and died to better the human race, or took actions in the belief that that was what they were doing at the time are of little or no concern. All that matters is that the net result of their efforts exists to benefit our own lives. And so it is that we inherit the sociological miasma in which we attempt to fritter away our insignificance through triviality, superficiality and superfluousness. We are a generation of individuals that exist solely for what is. What is.

That what was is wholly irrelevant is indicated by the obvious fact that there is a complete lack of respect for the world we have inherited. I say this because, in order to fully respect what is, you must appreciate how it came to be. As the past is little more than a distraction taken up by what are often viewed as somewhat incidentally comical (and therefore not fully integrated) elements of society, it is impossible for the larger part of society to respect the luxury afforded by generations of pain that came before us. Further, that which will come to pass, more commonly referred to as the future, is of equally little concern. Again, in order to plan for the future, you must firstly understand the status quo, as well as having respect for what has gone before. But why bother? In a world of easy credit and multitudinous options, life can be lived with supreme vivacity and intensity right now. Tomorrow is deemed irrelevant because it does not yet exist. Why save, why worry about the repayments, why waste effort distressing over whether the world will still be in one piece when you wake up on the morrow? It's here now, so make use of it. And so through an overwhelming desire to live a lifetime in the present, we dismiss our futures until the decisions required are forced upon us.

And so it is established that the current crop of human sybarites lack respect for the voluptuous and indulgent lives they are permitted to endure. I have taken time to explain this first because it is integral to the argument I am going to make later on.

People harp on about their rights. More often than not, human rights. When I was a kid, I believed that 'rights' started and ended with a literal diatribe that began 'You have the right to remain silent'. Oh, how naive was I? Society, in its infinite self-serving wisdom, has quite ingeniously injected into the word 'right' the meaning of 'expectation'. And Oh, how expectations have soared in recent decades. The world we have thusly created for ourselves is quite remarkable in a farcical sort of way. Despite our need to exorcise our insufficiency through an intensive serving of life in the now, we all stand precipitously on the precarious edge of litigious greed. There are lines we daren't cross for fear of the infringement of the rights of others. You do, after all, have the right not to have the actions of others impinge your personal lack of care, physically, mentally, or intellectually. However much of a joke I'd like to make of the latter, it's not really the thrust of my complaint. We have a right to voice complaint, without the expectation that we understand what we are complaining about, why we are complaining about it, or what the possible alternatives are to whatever it is that has our backs up. We have the right to fair consideration for employment (unless of course you happen to be a single white male, in which case you're not part of the diversity charter and likely to be pushed to the back of the queue. That is, if the potential employer is doing the done thing of ensuring the correct workplace diversity, hmm?), regardless of suitability for the role for which we are applying.

We have the right to demand that our personal gripes are addressed at length by the state, resulting in increasingly ludicrous efforts to satisfy everyone by binding the majority to conform to the stupidity of the minority.

We have the right to demand that our children not have to suffer any character building experience whatsoever so that we don't have to fulfil the biological parent role, as it fundamentally disrupts our efforts to live our lives right here, right now.

We have the right to demand that our beleaguered and overwhelmed free national health service provide us with IVF treatment so that we can have those fashionable child-like commodities in the first place should we not be able to conceive naturally!!

Hold it a second. Before you read any further, could you just read that last 'right' back again. Read it out loud for effect, so that it hits home. A health service designed to make sure that, should I get ill or injured, the service is there to help me get better is available to me and I don't have to worry about the cost because it's covered by taxes. A health service who's resources are overstretched by poor budgeting, litigation, hypochondria and overzealous health and safety legislation. A health service then diverting its already insufficient funding so that people who can't have kids get a free shot at having one artificially brought to life for them. While people across the country are dying because the NHS lacks the funds to treat them.

I'll be clear here, I think IVF treatment etc is a wonderful thing, if it works for you. But why should I pay for it? Why should the money I pay for in taxes to ensure that the country doesn't drop dead from cholera or measles, pay for you to try and have a child? You want a child that bad, pay for the treatment yourself. It's not like you'll be physically impaired if you don't get one, is it? And if you can't afford the treatment? Adopt! The benefits of which include not ruining that wonderfully sculpted body you have in the process of pregnancy (unless of course, you are one of the 13m obese people expected to populate the UK by 2010, in which case, please ignore that last).

No. I say that you do not have the right to free IVF treatment. I'll go further and say that you do not have the right to expect your stupidity to be covered through extensively revised legislation. Nor, for that matter, do you have the right to spew your ill-advised comments at the ever voracious media machine, hungry to devour the intense stupidity you insist on spitting onto the viewing public.

What right do we have to rights? I tell you that we have none. That we deserve none. Rights should not be automatically awarded to all and sundry within the state. They should be earned on merit by those who have demonstrated that they are able to live within a manageable frame of mutual understanding and within a reasonable sphere of responsibility. Get out of my face with your whining calls for what you want, what you need, what you deserve. The world doesn't owe you any favours, it sure as hell doesn't owe you a living. Get up off your knees, open your eyes and realise that, however much you try to pretend to the contrary, tomorrow is going to happen, and there will be another day after that, and so on for the rest of your life. It's time to stop floating on the stream of fatuousness on your way to being regurgitated into the delta of obscurity. Swim. For your life, SWIM! Make the effort to be a decent human being, and stop relying on the social network to bail you out every time you find the upstream effort requires a little sweat.

Alas, I plea in vain.


It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
- Julius Caesar




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Copyright Insane Bartender 2006-09-04 2:46 p.m.

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