Feeling safe – a human right!

But what about …

… traditional, conservative, outdated values? They are clearly more important than human rights, right?

I’ve written about societal norms in the rants section of my newsletter. So, I’m not going to repeat all that. However, I did get triggered by a conversation on the train that was difficult to ignore. Two women in their early 60s were talking about how women in their 20s can’t possibly know if they want children and how doctors should never agree to any procedures that would make it impossible for a woman to bear a child. No such procedures should be allowed until nature decides it’s time to shut things down. They were even critical of life-saving surgery.

Depending on where you live this might be a conversation you could overhear every day. For me it was not a point of view I would have expected to hear on a commuter train to Zurich.

I sometimes wonder what’s behind people’s urge to tell others how to live their lives or to even make life decision for them. Is it that they didn’t have a choice themselves? Is it that they would have chosen a career over having children if they could have? Is it because the world has progressed too much and they can’t keep up?

Change is hard. Changes in your personal life take time and for an entire society to change – well, that takes even longer. I mean if I look at my life growing up, it was simpler in a way. But it was also very black and white. You were either a boy or a girl and that was that. Boys loved girls and girls loved boys. A family was mom, dad and at least two children. You were obviously meant to get married before having children. The mom stayed home with the kids. The dad had a career and brought home the money. Household chores were firmly in female hands. And in the case of Switzerland when I was born women had only just gotten the right to vote. And no, I’m not that old. Switzerland was just insanely and embarrassingly late.

Is it difficult to keep up with the speed at which the world is changing? Well, yes. It is for me at least. I never had to worry about using the correct pronouns to address or talk about a person. I will happily do it but it does NOT YET come naturally. Gender identities? Difficult to grasp if you’re not affected yourself. That’s a lot of learning and listening we have to do. At the very least we need to open our minds to a non-binary world with more colors than just black and white and more numbers than just zeros and ones. Accepting other people for who they are doesn’t require us to understand every last detail of their story. We can be kind. We can listen. We can speak up – we are in this together.

There are groups of people that are finding their voice as their voice is starting to be heard. We as a society need to figure out how to be inclusive and adapt our - at times - very narrow societal norms so everybody feels safe. It’s a long ignored human right – not a new invention. Article three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. It was adopted in 1948. Feeling safe is a human right. One that is being trampled upon fueled by hate.

Hate of people who are “different”. Hate of people who live a life we don’t understand. Hate of people who possibly live a life we can’t or won’t live. Hate for lifestyles we don’t understand. Hate for things that scare us. Hate for anything and anyone we don’t understand. Just like our socks we need people to fit into a labelled drawer. It would look sloppy if socks were all over the place. Instead of removing the labels on our drawers and being more open-minded about what’s inside, we try pushing people into drawers that they very clearly don’t fit into.

As a society we like things orderly. Everything and everybody has their place. So far so good. I’m on board with that. It helps.

Now, let’s look at those left over socks that are missing their buddy. The clothes that we bought that don’t really fit. The ones that are not our style. The ones that we wouldn’t want to get caught in an accident in. Most of us are hanging on to those. We find a place for them in our elaborate wardrobe system. They have a place, we know they’re there. They don’t bother us.

Yet, when it comes to society and people not fitting whatever norms we inflict on them – we don’t want them to take up space. Like it’s ours to distribute. There’s enough room for everybody if we go through life with open minds. We might even find friends who are nothing like us. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Yes, we crave the feeling of belonging to a group but wouldn’t a society who accepts everybody, who is inclusive do just that? If everybody feels like they belong, isn’t that something worth striving for?

A bit of color for you - sunrise in Zurich earlier this week.

Notes:

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights