PHA-Exchange> Food for a masked thought

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 96 

 

On the Human Rights discourse and 'what one-is and is-not'.

 

1. One-is-what-one-is as long as the disguise lasts. Dropping the mask of the disguise is an act of reivindication of our liberty, or an avenue for its exercise and, at the same time, a denunciation of the so many lies we tell ourselves to continue living at peace with ourselves. 

 

2. What one finds behind one's own mask is always another mask --but the mask is you. These masks are the result of what they taught you to love and reject and that what you now really consciously or subconsciously love and reject. You use those masks, because you need them to live. Our lives are a complex and refined system of masking ourselves and pretending; wouldn't you agree?

 

3. But as persons obedient of both the laws-of-physics and the civic-laws-of-the-places-where-we-live, we cannot at the same time be the ones who think we are righting-the-wrong and the ones who naively or perversely 'right-the-actions-of-the-wolves' in the places where we do not live. We cannot continue to defy the-apparent, and not the-real order of the world. [Truth is not just solely what fits inside 'our-small-Chinese-shoe-of-what-we-consider-rational']. Whatever realism we adopt does not allow us to escape the grim social realities of the world that surrounds us. What we see there, requires we crumble the static mentality that sustains the prevailing social order in what has become a mirage of progress, or progress without a capital P (or what some have called 'an ironization of charity').

 

4. Years pass by and the worthy causes and good hopes die; forgetfulness ('the-conspiracy-of-forgetfulness') then becomes a necessary medicine to allow us to live in peace with ourselves and survive. Therefore, the only thing for which I have a deadly contempt is forgetting.

 

5. Arbitrary epilogue: So, speak up (and act) on HR we must --spilling out the-adrenalin-of-creative-anger we so seldom spill. [Or, is it true we live in a fear-of-desire-of-seeing-happen-what-we-so-much-hope-for?] .Never leave to think tomorrow what you can say today. (G. Cabrera Infante)

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn 

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Adapted from Jose Donoso, El Lugar Sin Limites, Catedra, Letras Hispanicas, Madrid, 2002.
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