The Bill of "Rights": A Plan to Do Right by Each Other and the Earth

Recently a friend accused me of being politically biased. I was making a case for responsible behavior at the congressional level, suggesting that all elected officials keep and live by their word. I pointed out that mine was a partisan-free request. I offered up this ideal in the face of the current Supreme Court nomination decisions being made by our national “leadership.”

I don’t think my friend realized that I have been making this suggestion for quite some time. He assumed that I was insisting on holding elected officials accountable right now, just because we are on the eve of a nomination to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I was actually suggesting that we start today because it seems like the sooner the better, just as I have requested this at different times two and five and ten years ago. In the midst of his anger, he pointedly asked, “What is your agenda?”

What’s my agenda? It is essentially a Bill of “Rights,” as in doing right by each other, our communities, and planet earth.

Here it is:

The Bill of Rights

We, the people, will work together to create a world made entirely of communities where. . .

• Natural resources are not depleted and the environment is healthy for all living things.
• Equal rights and opportunities fully and perpetually exist for all people.
• All children are conceived to live in families and communities that will lovingly provide for them.
• Guns and other weapons are no longer needed for self-defense of home and country.
• Elected officials are in office for a limited time, held to consistent honorability standards, and are only influenced by their personal constituents.
• Health care is a right and readily provided to everyone.
• Big business is not a protected entity and is fully accountable to all ecosystems, with fewer rights than those of the individual citizens they depend on.
• All people are able to earn a living wage and income is more fairly distributed.
• Media’s obligation is the factual distribution of information, honest representation of the communities it serves, and uplifting and uniting people.
• Economies are measured by individual and collective quality of life, with humane living conditions and resource regeneration at least equal in concern to profit.

When I shared this with another friend he claimed that human nature would never allow this bill to be realized. My response was that if we don’t aspire to create this world, one that reveals and manifests the best in each of us, why bother with life? He pointed to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with each person’s unmet physiologic needs being the reason we could not actualize the ten points above. He implied that people are too self-serving, competitive, and downright ugly in their struggle to survive and prosper, which is exactly the point of the Bill of “Rights”: To help us individually and collectively have our basic and safety needs met; to be able to live in places filled with love and belonging, with opportunities to grow and succeed; to build esteem in all humans in order to build accountability, respect, and trust; and, as an entire species, to become actualized stewards of the earth.

This is my agenda.