My sister shared this video on Facebook last week, and it has been stuck in my head ever since. It's a brilliant reimagining of the song that inspired it, Apologize, and borrows heavily from the original video's style. The divergence - and perhaps what makes this version so great - is the reframing of the central conflict. Rather than addressing irreconcilable differences between lovers, it applies the concept of a relationship being too damaged for apologies to King George III and the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. We'll overlook the third-grade-textbook portrayal of the king as a greedy tyrant (history shows the conflict to be a struggle between the colonists and parliament, with George supporting the British constitution and the actions of his ministers). As a statement of independence, it's outstanding.
Today, while the song was playing in my mind for the billionth time, it crossed wires with some thoughts from Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting. I've read a fair bit of Kohn's shorter articles and have skimmed bits of the book before, but this is my first cover-to-cover read of the book.
Two key concepts to Unconditional Parenting are:
Those practies that define conditional parenting tend to be ways of doing things to children to produce obedience. By contrast...unconditional parenting [hinges upon] the theme of working with children to help them grow into decent people and good decision-makers.
and:
How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.
This mixed in my head with these lines from the song:
We want to make it clear, we believe this much is true
All men were created with certain
Unalienable rights
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
Of happiness
Which refers to this passage from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
And as these things mixed in my brain, I mused...what would parenting look like if it has as a basic assumption the idea that every person, including children, had these inalienable rights?
As citizens of the USofA, we say that we believe these things. Actually, I believe we would say "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Self-evident, as in, so basic that they shouldn't even need to be said. Unfortunately, we seem to expect to have our own rights acknowledged by government, but often don't consider these rights as something each of us ought to respect and protect on behalf of other people, even outside of government affairs.
I had to wonder, how exactly does one define life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Ayn Rand has a fantastic Q&A regarding just these principles. Regarding life, she says:
the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
She comments further that the enjoyment of one's life includes the rights to liberty and pursuit of happiness. Life is the fundamental right and all other rights are "consequences or corollaries" of this right.
She describes liberty thusly:
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.
and also:
Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.
And finally, regarding the pursuit of happiness, she writes:
The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that Man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men. It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the purpose of a man’s existence nor prescribe his choice of happiness.
What do you think, do you see seeds for parenting there? How do the concepts of unalienable rights overlap with parenting philosophies such as Kohn's or others?
