Human Rights Day 2014: Fragility

“Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.”

Sting, Fragile, YouTube

When I hear this version of the above song I always think of the IMAX film Sting wrote and performed the soundtrack for.

Starring my beloved dolphins: it was about the ocean and I sat in a theatre in Niagara Falls several years ago and was in awe.

The music and the lyrics touched me and moved me, not just because the enormity of something like an ocean dumbfounded me, but because I felt so completely tiny and insignificant in the vastness of everything.

The idea of the ocean has always beckoned because of all this, because I love it so much, but on a day such as this:

The United Nation’s designated HUMAN RIGHTS DAY, December 10, 2014,

I want to highlight Sting’s words and specifically the line from above.

I feel so small and insignificant on days such as this, but I especially like the theme of the 2014 Human Rights Day: everyday should be a day for human rights!

I wish I could shout this to the world because I know what I say here will only reach a minuscule segment of it, but I write this anyway.

I wish I could shake the world into finding respect for all human beings.

After thousands of years of the horrible things humans have done to one another and after two world wars.

The UN declared December 10th Human Rights Day in 1950, highlighting this with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

How many lives have been lost and human rights infringed upon since that time?

Whether it’s all the division and unrest in the US right now, in the midst of several disturbing incidence between young black boys/men and white law enforcement.

After what happened here in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, with the senseless killing of Nathan Cirillo on Parliament Hill.

Or in addition and by expansion, with ISIS and in the middle East.

The admissions of the CIA and their torture tactics revealed.

Whether it’s the growing racism in countries in Europe, all these years after such blemishes on our world as the Nazi regime’s atrocities.

Racism. Terrorism. Sexism. I don’t care. I want it all to stop!

Discrimination of Native people in my own country in the past and still now in the present.

, the helplessness and uselessness I feel living still as a woman with a disability in the 21st century.

Or all of the above.

I want more for us all. Much much more than the status quo.

“Nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.”

I repeat this line from the start of this post because I can’t help tearing up when I think of it or hear it sung and my heart hurts so much, which leads me to write this now, as it’s all I have to do to even attempt to quell the hurt I feel.

I hear variations of the above stories I speak of, on the news every night, and I want to reach out and shut off my television, not wanting to hear any more.

I feel like I must fight for my rights and I know others are fighting more desperately for theirs.

It’s on days like this when I am just so so sick and tired of fighting.

Be kind to one another. Please!

As tough as a large portion of our world thinks they are and tries to portray themselves to be to the rest of us, I know the title of this song to be true.

Fragile. That’s all we really are.