Welcome!

Welcome to "i can haz rights now?", a site dedicated to protecting and upholding the rights of all. We are currently in a culture that overwhelmingly supports the rights enshrined in our Constitution, yet does not understand their application or notice when they are being taken away. According to years of polling data, most Americans cannot name the rights they are granted in the Bill of Rights and even more have never heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document the US not only signed but helped co-author (Eleanor Roosevelt was the US delegate).

With the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle we should be more informed than ever, yet this does not appear to be the case. The addition of more voices seems only to have added to the noise, not the discussion, with disastrous consequences. Thomas Jefferson warned us of such a scenario when he said, "liberty and ignorance cannot coexist," yet here we are with more information and less knowledge than ever before. We are all attention deficient from smart phones, tabloids, cable news, and DVRs. We read the headline, but can't bother to read the article. We hear a 5-second sound bite and accept it as fact. We turn off the documentary on climate change and turn on the Kardashians. We text a friend while ignoring the one sitting next to us. We question if we really need to exert the time and effort to keep our bodies healthy or expand our minds; can't someone or something else just do it for us?

The answer, for most things in life, but especially for the maintenance of our free society, is a resounding no. To allow someone else to dictate the terms of our freedom is to surrender not only the control of, but access to said freedom. When we become spectators rather than active participants in our democracy, we hand over agency to whomever decides to take it, and that someone may not be the person we really want to have unregulated power over us.

To remain a free people, we must be an educated, engaged populace. Otherwise, we must be prepared to face the type of Orwellian dystopia we have always feared. Or are we there already?