You may not have noticed this. The world “celebrated” International Human Rights Day the other day, even as wars across the planet continued, bombs fell, children died. What if “freedom from war” were a human right?
I don’t ask this to be cynical, but rather to expand the reach of what should be a global day of connection and collective inner reflection. International Human Rights Day is December 10. It’s an annual honoring of the day in 1948 when the newly formed United Nations, in the wake of World War II, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which publicly recognizes “the inherent dignity and... equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.”
All members of the human family! Every last one of us must be valued. This is not simply a hidden, personal wish, but a public—legal—document, posted globally in 577 languages (from Abhkaz to Zulu), declaring that all humans are equal at the cores of their being and deserve the chance to live full lives, free from... a whole slew of hellish possibilities, including: slavery, torture, arbitrary arrest, and much, much more. And we deserve, my God, freedom of thought. Hey, book banners! Did you know your cowardly insistence on limiting human awareness is against world law?
We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself.
This past Tuesday I was informed that it was International Human Rights Day in an email from Musicians Without Borders, an extraordinary nonprofit, publicly funded organization, formed in 1999 (during the war in Kosovo), that I’ve written about in the past. Indeed, the recognition of this day by Musicians Without Borders is what brought it to life for me, instantly pushing me beyond my own cynicism and impulse to ask “So what?”
I mean, the U.N. doesn’t have any global enforcement power—and, as is utterly and horribly obvious, millions or maybe billions of human beings remain trapped today in various forms of hell on Earth, from war to starvation to poverty to slavery. And the Universal Declaration itself, with its preamble and 30 articles of declared rights, is written in legal, bureaucratic language that obscures the deep truths it’s attempting to define and essentially turns them into abstractions. In a way, the declaration separates us from our own rights.
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the declaration states. “They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
Yes, absolutely, but how does this impact the actual state of the world? To begin with, I would cry beyond the legalese of the declaration: Come on! What you’re saying is that we’re all the same! We’re all born helpless and needing love. We’re all vulnerable. And we all have the same spiritual connection to the universe itself. Please, oh world, let us live this truth. Let us organize ourselves around it.
But how, oh how, does a truth this deep manifest itself in the real world? It can’t be simplistically “enforced.” And here’s where Musicians Without Borders comes in. The spiritual depth of the Declaration of Human Rights comes to life when we construct reality around it—and that’s what this organization does. Its raison d’etre is to counter the effects of war around the world through music, and give those who are trapped in war and occupation and apartheid the power to be their deepest selves.
Laura Hassler, the organization’s director, puts it this way in a recent essay, in which she calls the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “a framework of guiding principles, a collective conscience for our organization and our programs around the world.”
“Why? Because music creates connection and empathy, builds community, brings people together.”
But be careful! “...just as any powerful human potential,” she adds, “music can also be used to unite one group against another, as it has been many times. So, it is crucial for social changemakers to have guidelines, and the declaration provides these.”
She also notes: “If human rights only apply when politically convenient to the most powerful, they are not really rights—they are arbitrarily applied privileges.”
Musicians Without Borders, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, works in conflict zones around the world: Jordan, El Salvador, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kosovo, Rwanda and, yes, Palestine.
Since 2021, it has run a program in Bethlehem that provides children, including those in refugee camps, with weekly music sessions, where they can sing together and learn traditional Arabic music—that is to say, enjoy life for a while despite the instability of their lives in the West Bank.
Laura put it to me thus: Their work in Palestine “is aimed at supporting marginalized Palestinian children who suffer the impacts of occupation and apartheid. It is about strengthening resilience, building community, giving children access to creativity and a feeling of safety in an extremely unsafe environment.”
Giving children access to their own creativity! As I read her words in an email she sent me, I felt a gush of spiritual joy and could only cry: Wow! This is the deeper meaning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: our right to have access to our own creative spirit. To put it another way: our right to help create the collective, human future.
We’re not just listeners. We’re not just consumers. In the column I wrote about Musicians Without Borders five years ago, I quoted Laura thus: “Every person has music in them!”
