Today is international Human Rights Day. I've been out of the office for a few weeks, so it seems a bit removed from past years. However, I'm finding that the current assignment I've been given is giving me much more insight into how to communicate human rights than I had expected.
On November 21, my partner and I welcomed our first child into the world. Oliver Gareth has given us both the opportunity to learn things we never thought we would be learning. Indeed, the finer details of child rearing go far beyond the carrying around of an egg in 11th grade home economics.
Hardest to learn has been the primitive language that Oliver exhibits. Seven years of journalism school, graduate and undergraduate, taught me much about how humans communicate. However, Oliver seems to defy all textbooks on teh subject. Rather, I've found the past three weeks full of new theories that resemble more of advanced behavioral theory and linguistics, breaking every little noise and cry down to the most fundamental root of language, predicating even symbolic representation, what I had always thought to be the first building block of communication.
The symbolic nature of my son is like a car just off the assembly line, its tachometer not even rolling over one count. Any representation he has comes from his experience during fetal development. We can try to create facsimiles of these symbols, but they are not truths. Playing white noise does not completely recreate the same reality for a new born, much like the shadows on the wall in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Oliver is just beginning to collect the perceived artifacts that will ultimately make up the reality he sees. From that will come logic and reason, desires and choices, personality and behavior. And all this will influence who he communicates, for what purpose he communicates, and how he receives communication from other sources. And for now, he works on two basic principles: that which is positive, and that which is negative. His responses are tied to these two perceived actions, not yet even forming the most fundamental values that influence symboles, values like fear, joy, harm, peace, etc.
The rhetoric employed by those wishing to take away the rights afforded to all humans touches us all at the most fundamental point of our perception, that which denotes negative over positive action When we strip away messages, moving beyond even the symbolic icons that form the roots of a message, we see the chain the links negative action with negative outcomes.
I think this is why I'm so weary toward using negative messages for a desired outcome of anything good. Indeed, tapping into fear and danger can move or motivate a person a person toward an outcome that has good or positive results. However, it remains a miscommunication. I could use fear to motivate someone to obey laws that protect human rights. Yet, in doing so, the end result is not pure. I can not recreate such a truth, much in the same way that I can not recreate life within the womb in the external world.
There's a great tool that has just been released by The Opportunity Agenda which stays committed toward recreating a positive avenue of communications, one which assures greater clarity in acheiving the end result. As we recall the rights afforded to all humans, on this international Human Rights Day, we should all remember the need to keep our message pure and focused on the positive. We might have to deal with a bit more screaming and crying than we would if we took the easy way out. But, our message will be much louder and clearer.
Check out the Human Rights Toolkit here:
http://opportunityagenda.org/talking_human_rights_united_states
