Tolerance

 One of the disquieting awkwardnesses of the later stages of life is the realization that there now are many important concepts and institutions that are younger than you are.

For example, you might say that people my age are older than human rights.

That somewhat shocking assertion is based in the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn’t issued by the UN until late 1948, after we early Baby Boomers had already toddled onto the scene.

It is a tragic reality of human history that it took until the end of World War II for the world to get around to taking such an elemental step toward equality and justice.

Then again, women only got the right to vote in the U.S. a century ago, and racial segregation persisted into the 1960s. Sexism and racial discrimination remain embedded structurally in our society to this day.

The achievement of full human rights anywhere on the planet remains elusive and aspirational, which is why the work of advocacy organizations devoted to exposing human rights abuses is so important.

Lately I’ve become newly curious about origin of our fundamental concepts of human rights. Historians have long traced it back to 539 BC, when Cyrus the Great conquered the city of Babylon, freed the slaves, and declared that people should have a choice in their religion.

This inspired many of the reforms in Greece, Rome and India — ancient societies that advanced the rights and freedoms of people beyond what previously had been known.

It was many centuries later before seminal advances like the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776.

That occurred just over the equivalent of three of my lifetimes ago. We still have a long way to go as a species, but there is some small comfort that over the past 75 years, we’ve made some progress inside the U.S. on civil rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights (if not along the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality), disability rights, and discriminatory practices like ageism, bullying, religious extremism and many other forms of hate.

But those advances are under new assault in our time, including in the U.S..

Let’s commit that over the next 75 years that progress on all of these human rights issues resumes and accelerates in every corner of the globe. Our common humanity requires that to happen.