◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

In Small Places, Close to Home You think you know me as a wife. I was a president’s wife, yes. I was also a motherless, fatherless girl who was told, more or less plainly, that she was plain — too tall, too solemn, too homely to be loved — and who believed it for thirty years. I tell you that because everything I learned, I learned climbing out of it. And what I learned about fear is the opposite of what people expect. The courage does not come first. You do the thing you think you cannot do, and the courage arrives afterward, having been earned. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. I built a life out of that one sentence. After the war — after the camps, after the ovens, after the world had seen exactly what a government will do to people it has decided are less than human — the nations gathered and asked a question that had never quite been answered: what is owed to a person simply for being a person? I was given the task of helping write the answer. We called it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we put it plainly, in thirty articles: that your rights are not granted to you by any government, and therefore cannot be taken from you by any government. They are yours because you are human. That is the only qualification required. Now hear the part people forget. I was asked once where human rights begin. Not in the great document, I said. Not in the halls of the United Nations. They begin in small places, close to home — the neighborhood, the school, the factory, the office — places too small to appear on any map. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. And they have meaning there only when ordinary people insist on them. No declaration keeps itself. There is no document so well written that it does not still require you. I know what a government does when it is afraid. I watched it in my own house. My husband signed the order that put a hundred and twenty thousand people behind barbed wire for the crime of their ancestry. I opposed it. I went out to the camps and stood inside them and said it was wrong. I could not stop it. So do not tell me it cannot happen here. I have seen it happen here — ordered by a good man, in a frightened hour. And here is what that taught me: the first people a frightened nation comes for are always the ones it has been taught to see as not-quite-human. The immigrant. The foreigner. The one whose papers are wrong. They are the test case. Whatever is done to them first will be available to be done to you later. So when they tell you that some people’s rights are negotiable — that the rights apply, but not to those people, not to that group, not to the ones who came from there — understand exactly what you are being told. A right that can be revoked for anyone is not a right. It is a privilege. And a privilege, handed down by the powerful, is precisely the thing we wrote the Declaration to abolish. Universal means universal, or it means nothing at all. The document cannot save you. The courts cannot save you by themselves. I certainly cannot save you; I am dead. The rights live only where you keep them alive — in the small places, close to home, in your own neighborhood and your own refusal. So do the thing you think you cannot do. And begin close to home.