By Greg “RU Twisted” Drobny
It has become apparent to me lately that the overwhelming majority of people making public calls for political action have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
I know, I know—this isn’t shocking or news or anything unique to say. Everyone says this, but it’s always backing up their own view of what’s right or wrong.
What I’m talking about here is a bit different. It goes to the fundamental core of all political rhetoric.
After almost five years of writing high-profile articles for Ranger Up’s The Rhino Den and Unapologetically American—and engaging at every level with readers both of our blogs and other sources—I have noticed something specific. Namely, that very few people truly understand what “rights” are—or, perhaps more importantly, what they are not.
Let me give you a few, quick examples prior to laying out some serious sarcasm (oxymoronic: see, me) and offer a few thoughts to get our hamsters running laps that go nowhere. That is, after all, my specialty.
After the recent shooting in Oregon—and nearly every public shooting…ever—we see calls for “reasonable” and “common sense” gun laws that, we are assured by these ever-knowledgeable people, don’t infringe on the right protected by the Second Amendment. I’m going to leave the argument against that kind of approach for the time being and instead draw attention to a comment that seems to crop up more and more often within these same calls:
“What about my right to not live in fear of being gunned down??”
This outcry—or something very similar—is becoming all-too-common in political discourse. What is most troubling is that it isn’t smacked down for the absurdity that it most assuredly is.
What we are seeing here is the transference of personal feelings into the category of individual rights. Thus the proliferation of such happy horse shit as “microaggression” and the advocating of laws against certain types of online speech. Claiming that one has a right to feel/not feel a certain way has literally no stopping point—there is no logical place to say, “here, but not here.”
The now-viral letter by an Oregon teacher offers a classic example of this line of thought. She claims that lawmakers have not done their jobs and clearly don’t care about her “right… to attend school without fear of facing senseless slaughter by machine-gun fire…” And instead of saying, “hey, wait a second. You’re claiming that a feeling is a right? That’s pretty lame,” tens of thousands of people have shared her story—leading to hundreds of thousands reading it as if she is somehow a voice of authority.
All of this of course just begs the question: what is a right? Many others naturally follow, like where they come from, who decides, who guarantees it/them, etc. These are all sadly lacking from the debate on….well, just about anything. And everything.
Also missing from these discussions is anything remotely close to consistent thought. Another example that proves interesting is the call for a right to marry whomever one chooses—that the state should not be able to stand in the way of two people wishing to enter into what essentially amounts to a social contract together. If they are both consenting adults who agree to the terms, stopping them from doing so is an infringement upon their rights.
Here arises a huge problem for a good many people who make that very argument, however. What they did is just make a solid case against minimum wage laws—legislation which they most likely support.
Think about it: I want to hire you for $4/hour, you want to be hired for $4/hour, and we both agree to the terms—is the state not infringing upon our right to enter into this mutually agreed-upon contract of a social nature? Wouldn’t it be consistent to hold the same in both cases?
Let that one sit in your brain for a bit and we’ll get back to the big questions regarding rights themselves. After all, that still sits at the heart of these political footballs.
What are rights? I could ask a quick follow-up that helps show how complicated this can get: what does it matter?
Consider a scenario where you wake up tied to a chair in the basement of some sadistic psychopath’s house. He walks in and, just before he breaks out his blowtorch, you scream, “you can’t do this! You’re violating my rights!” Does he immediately stop and say, “Sorry. My bad,” and untie you?
So we immediately run into a problem—whatever rights are or aren’t, and whether you or I agree on those terms, they are not a magical guarantor of their own existence. You can’t, for instance, scream about your “right to not live in fear” while someone is chasing you down and trying to kill you.
Well, you can. But it won’t do any good.
Naturally this all digs into the question of the guaranteeing of rights—something ye ol’ Constitution was supposed to do. But there again we see no guarantee. You can hold up a copy of the Bill of Rights all you want, but the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms still exists and will still kick in your door for selling a shotgun with a 14” barrel or making your own whiskey for profit. That piece of paper isn’t magically stopping their forcible seizure of your assets.
But even if we claim that a body of people—often called government—is needed to ensure these rights are protected, it not only doesn’t answer the question of what they are, but grants different abilities to those in that body than to those outside of it. This raises far more questions than it answers, in other words, and doesn’t even begin to touch the area that deals with how a governing body, once given authority over those rights, then has the power to take them away—essentially making them more like privileges than anything else. But I digress.
I’ll leave you with this thought experiment: imagine you and I are on a deserted island. No one there but us, and we decide to establish who has the “right” to do what. Do you think I would agree that you can do something I can’t? I wouldn’t, and neither would you. So whatever a right is or isn’t, in this scenario it’s easy to see that we have to start with consistency—if it applies to me it applies to you. 
Now add two more people to the island. Does that change anything? What if there were ten more, and half of us agreed that there are things none of us should do—does that magically make the other half stop doing those things, or guarantee that they won’t? Or, more importantly, was it justified for half of us to decide such things for the whole group, and if we did, are these things we refer to as rights….actually rights?
Again, these are decidedly complex questions. But what is definitely not helping is the fact that people of all classes—political and we peasants—completely ignore them in favor of the assumption that whatever I like is a right. We dismiss some really complex questions while clamoring for the importance of feelings.
Well, I’m here to tell you, whatever a right is or isn’t, guess what? You don’t have a right to a feeling or not having a feeling. You don’t have a right to not be offended; you don’t have a right to feel safe; you don’t have a right to rainbows, gumdrop smiles, and unicorns.
If you think you do, then let me know where you live. I’d like to join you so I can see what fantasy land looks like from the inside.