Americans assume that rights come from the struggle of a group; Americans very much believe in the Margaret Mead "I believe that a small group of dedicated people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
I would be loath to say that the organizers of this event in Shanghai aren't exactly that definition. Certainly, it took their bravery and skills and resources to put this together. But what I want to point out is that sometimes rights don't come from the actions of individuals, in a certain, foundational sense, but that rather they come from a government granting those rights, which then become part of the social fabric. In America, our rights are very neatly stated in the appropriately titled Bill of Rights, with other items coming from the Constitution proper. And that is a very neat way to do things - but it's certainly not, for example, the experience of the United Kingdom, which lacks any real central document laying out the rights and privileges of its citizens. Nobody, for example, has a "right" to an abortion, in the American sense where the right comes from the 4th Amendment, but rather has the right to a medical procedure authorized under the National Health Service Act, which is a very different thing on paper, though not in practice.
The divide then is appropriate to this week; what the protesters in Tiananmen wanted were rights in the American manner of obtaining them. What the gay rights celebrants this week achieved were rights in the British manner of obtaining them. The question then is who is right? The American-style activists or the British-style? My observation is that the similarity between China and the United Kingdom is that they both share a similar highly entrenched central political structure that brooks no alternative - try telling a Tudor, Stuart, Orange, or Hanoverian English monarch that they need to cease oppressing their regional minorities, allow free, unbridled speech, and provide government protection of exploited workers, and see how far you get. Under such a central and established government, only severe international political crisis can produce such a change, in the absence of which, the slow-stead-statist model of rights, in which people quietly begin to formalize the structures of those rights, and then call for their open exercise through the state, rather than against it, that seems to work the best, much in the manner in which England developed a means of publicizing proceedings in Parliament, which, once-upon-a-time, was a state crime to report. In such a case, we would find then that the best support for change, paradoxically, is through the structure of government itself, rather than through attacking the government. But of course, this is something I'm just saying, rather than stating as a universal point.
Also - new plan. Each post includes at least one funny picture. Right after the close.
That Is All For Now.
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