Give Your Voice To Rights That Don't Matter To You In 2013

Harmony from afar

The old song goes, “I’ll like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony …” We all know that the world is singing many songs and mostly never the same words, or the same tempo and harmony is so distant that we hold hands and sway our heads into a dreamland of Utopia hoping it signifies peace and harmony.

To sing we need a voice and to that voice we need the words, lyrics that represent our humanity, our struggles, our victories, our losses, our pains, the quest for justice, the call for war, the identities we have or the differences we want to project – there is much for song and much to do.

A world riven

The voice is important, it is critical to producing the sound we need all to hear to bring people to listen so that they can reason and then hopefully they can agree.

We live in an unequal world riven with great injustices, wars, disease, poverty, dispute and much else with people populating the broadest spectrum of extremes between palatial comfort and atrocious discomfort – we cannot stand still and watch the world go by.

Lend your voice

I challenge you to lend your voices this year to that which is just, that which is fair, that which lifts and confers rights on the least amongst us and the most different from us.

We should extricate ourselves from rules, creeds, customs, beliefs, traditions and cultures that bind us to age-old systems that persecute and prosecute others needlessly and become the Good Samaritan of humanity setting people free to be the best they can be because of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity we all belong to.

Stand!

Let colour, tribe, language, region become insignificant and enter the global village of what allows us to laugh together rather than cry in anguish, what makes us shout in unison than shoot at each other and what lets us embrace those we once saw as lepers rather than ostracise them.

There is much to stand up and be counted for in the quest for human rights and the protection of the same, the campaigning against abuse; the abuse of children, of women, of the vulnerable and of the powerless, rolling back the cloudy pall of sententiousness for the fresh air of acceptance and the fight against institutionalised corruption, racism, rape, victimisation and oppression.

Your voice, the seed

This is not a call to forsake your values but to use your values better to give value to others that you might once have been tempted if only in the slightest to deem worthless.

The voice amongst our friends, in our communities, in our societies, in our countries and well beyond that into the world is what will make the difference to both your lives and those of others around you.

Appeal to reason and reasonableness, persuade but do not dismiss, disagree but refuse to be disagreeable, you are allowed to be irreverent without being disrespectful – call out the hypocrites and expose falsehood – stand with the honest, just and true always because they will always matter.

Know yourself, know others

There is no shelter in excuses and using moral equivalences to justify your position stop you having the essentially critical self-examination and self-scrutiny you need to adapt and change for the better.

There is a voice in you that needs to be heard, in your experiences, your intellect, your unique thinking unclouded by indoctrination, and the better world you want to see – Speak up, stand out, make waves – for when your voice is heard for the least amongst you, you protect both yourselves and others from future oppression that could be overwhelming and unassailable if in your silence you lost those who would have done everything to stand with you and for you.

Make it a year where you fight for rights that mean nothing to you but mean the most to those whose lives and the pursuit of happiness depend on it.

Happy New Year!