Rights and Responsibilities

This should not be considered a diatribe against guns or smoking, as they are only two of the problems that afflict us as we attempt to live and breathe.  Yet they seem to highlight what one may call the state of our nation.

This nation is not now great nor was it ever great because there is a gun in every drawer, or a pack of cigarettes in every sleeve.  When people begin to worry more about rights than responsibilities, one can measure discretely the downfall of that nation.  Many of the petty laws over which we argue these days are a result of the selfishness that seems to have arisen in the past twenty years.  If a smoker were polite and courteous enough to put out his cigarette when he realized that it bothered the person sitting next to him, there would be no need for an arbitrary smoking law.  If a weapon owner would ask himself if that gun were really his right by law and nature, or if perhaps instead this nation would be better without the millions of guns in the hands of its populace, then perhaps we would not suffer from our current level of mayhem.  Unfortunately, many people today do not seem terribly concerned with their responsibilities, but only with their rights.  We do not think of what we owe, but rather what we are owed.

Beyond our so-called human rights, humans are as much a part of nature as anything, and consequently, we are subject to the natural processes of the world.  We very much depend upon each other, and therefore I do not believe or accept the argument of bother, which is to say that if I am not bothering you, I may do as I please.  We have learned that we cannot cut down the forest without killing the animals, regardless of how much care we take in our physical treatment of them.  We can fix a bird’s wing, but it will nevertheless starve if we destroy its habitat.