Crafting a global bill of rights

I think highly of Ode, and have subscribed to it for several of my friends and family as well as myself. There are many brilliant ideas in Ode stories, often coupled with a feeling of optimism, which I share. While I appreciate these individual successes, alone they are not enough to prevent calamities such as international pandemics and global warming. When 1.4 million people are born into, or migrate into, urban slums each week, two thirds of humanity, 4 billion people, live off of less than four dollars a day, and the polar ice caps are rapidly melting, buying a Prius or, meditating, or supporting a new candidate is not enough. We need a global plan, a plan for humanity, to address the global problems that confront us.

I do not claim to have created such a plan, but there is one. The plan is to re-write the rules for those who govern. This plan is not new. For thousands of years with sticks and stones our ancestors dominated one another through force. While we undeniably still act like brutes, both individually and as nations, we have an emerging social order to curb these tendencies. Through our ability to reason and write we have gradually constructed an agreement, a social contract among each of us as well as those who govern, that there are certain fundamental rights that each of us have, regardless of race, wealth, gender or country – simply by being human.

Human rights documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights embody this social contact. Now it is time for an International Convention on Human Rights that is enforceable in the courts of all countries. Let us spend 99% of our time and funds reading about and implementing the wonderful ideas in Ode magazine, but let’s also make sure that we spend 1% of our time working on a plan that will restructure our social order so that there are fewer problems to address.