Time for Outrage!

Indifference: The Worst Attitude

It is true that the reasons for outrage today may seem less clear or the world more complicated. Who runs things? Who decides? It is not always easy to distinguish the answers from among all the forces that rule us. It is no longer a question of a small elite whose schemes we can clearly comprehend. This is a vast world, and we see its interdependence. We are interconnected in ways we never were before, but some things in this world are unacceptable. To see this, you have only to open your eyes. I tell the young: just look, and you’ll find something. The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, “I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.” Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it. We can identify two great new challenges:

(1) The immense gap between the very poor and the very rich, which never ceases to expand. This is an innovation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The very poor in the world today earn barely $2 a day. We cannot let this gap grow even wider. This alone should arouse our commitment.

(2) Human rights and the state of the planet. After Liberation, I had the opportunity to be involved with drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, at the Chaillot Palace in Paris . It was in my capacity as the chief of staff for Henri Laugier, assistant secretary general of the UN and secretary of the Commission on Human Rights, that I, with many others, was chosen to participate in drawing up this declaration. I will never forget the role played by Eleanor Roosevelt and by René Cassin, commissioner for justice and education in the Free French government in exile in London and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968, in formulating the declaration. Nor can I forget Pierre Mendиs France, a member of the UN Economic and Social Council, to whom we submitted our text before it went to the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the General Assembly. This committee included the fifty-four member states of the UN at that time, and I was its secretary. It is to René Cassin that we owe the term “universal” rights, and not “international,” as proposed by our Anglo-American friends. For the real issue at the end of the Second World War was to free ourselves from the threats that totalitarianism held over mankind’s head, and to do so, the member states of the UN had to commit to respecting universal rights. That is how to forestall the argument for full sovereignty that a state likes to make when it is carrying out crimes against humanity on its soil. That was the case with Hitler, who as master in his own house believed he was allowed to commit genocide. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes a lot to the universal revulsion against Nazism, Fascism, totalitarianism-but also, thanks to our presence, to the spirit of the Resistance. I felt that we had to move fast so as not to succumb to the hypocrisy of victors promoting allegiance to values that no one intended to enforce faithfully.

I cannot resist the impulse here to quote Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a nationality”; and Article 22: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” Even if this declaration has only advisory, rather than legal, force, it has nonetheless played a powerful role since 1948. We have seen colonized peoples refer to it in their struggles for independence. It fortified their spirits in the fight for liberty.

I am happy to see that NGOs and social movements such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens, the International Federation for Human Rights and Amnesty International have multiplied and become increasingly active in recent decades. It is clear that in order to be effective today, one has to act in a network and be connected in other ways, taking advantage of modern means of communication.

To the young, I say: look around you, you will find things that make you justifiably angry-the treatment of immigrants, illegal aliens and Roma. You will see concrete situations that provoke you to act as a real citizen. Seek and you shall find!