Human Rights

Just this afternoon I watched a program hosted by the College of International Relations about Human Rights. All along I thought they were simply just the right to love, the right to vote, the right to have sex and of course the right to freedom of speech. Little did I (or we) know there are more rights we’re not aware of that we can actually declare to protect ourselves and our dignity.

Here are the thirty Human Rights:

1. We are Born Free and Equal

2. Don’t Discriminate

3. The Right to Life

4. No Slavery

5. No Torture

6. You Have Rights No Matter Where You Go

7. We are All Equal Before the Law

8. Your Human Rights are Protected by the Law

9. No Unfair Detainment

10. The Right to Trial

11. We are Always Innocent ’til Proven Guilty

12. The Right to Privacy

13. Freedom to Move

14. To Seek a Safe Place to Live

15. Right to a Nationality

16. Marriage and Family

17. The Right to Your Own Things

18. Freedom of Thought

19. Freedom of Expression

20. Right to Public Assembly

21. Right to Democracy

22. Social Security

23. Workers’ Rights

24. Right to Play

25. Food and Shelter for All

26. Right to Education

27. Copyright

28. A Fair and Free World

29. Responsibility

30. No One Can Take Away Your Human Rights (may include your own parents)

Born out of the atrocities and enormous loss of life during World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created by the United Nations to provide a common understanding of what everyone’s rights are. It forms the basis for a world built on freedom, justice and peace.
Source: Youth for Human Rights International

EMO-Logy

Emos are widely regarded as one of the most pathetic subtypes of white people, taking themselves and their “suffering” far too seriously. The emos have their own music, fashion, argot and other trappings in a desperate, though ultimately futile attempt to prove their uniqueness.

As a rule of thumb, an emo will be from a comfortable, middle class background with understanding, pleasant parents. All of this is irrelevant to an emo who will consider themselves misunderstood and repressed regardless of the reality.

Source: Uncyclopedia – Emo

Hey hey hey, emo people! Flame me not for the above passage! I simply smuggled, er, borrowed it from Uncyclopedia. Somehow it’s more accurate and to the point than Wikipedia.

Anyway this isn’t an entry bitching about emo people or the subculture. I am simply writing my opinions and viewpoints on the said subculture. After all this is my blog. Anything goes according to moi.

I personally have a friend who’s a genuine emo kid. I call her *Shane. Being an illegitimate child who hasn’t even known her father, she lives with her mother’s uncle and claims to lead a misunderstood life. At least that deviates from the claim that emos normally come from comfortable middle or upper-class lives.

Devoid

Only the difference between truth and lies, courage and cowardice.
-Minerva McGonagall, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This empty feeling… It is both a good and bad thing. You feel no mirth within yet there’s enough room to fill you with various emotions.

Empty. That’s what I’m feeling now, and I don’t mean in an emo-ish sense. I just feel no emotion at all. Nothing. Neither happiness or gloom, hope nor despair. I can’t hold a knife, bear myself with scars reminding me of pain I myself have inflicted. I just can’t bring myself to smile yet the look on my face isn’t indicating a frown. I am not feeling suicidal or grief-stricken yet I can’t feel creativity and inspiration surging through my veins.

How can I even say I feel empty when I’m not feeling anything at all? No wonder they invented the word “apathy.” I have my own color pallet of emotions. White is what paints my heart now. According to a Psychology student from school, white is not necessarily a color. It is in fact an absence of color. This is an absence of emotion.

As I write, this emptiness begins to diminish. I feel a sense of purpose now generating from hands as it manifests in my fingertips. Then my will to write returns, materializing itself in the form of these words. I learn that the only way to fill this void is to do something, anything. Not by sheer force or cumbersome shame, yet by pure will.