Year 2017: Children have ‘The First Right’ over this Earth!

By: Shreepal Singh

Children derive their rights – even the right to come into this world – from us and we derive our rights from our forefathers. It is a natural process – a system – of ‘right in succession’ and today we adults are endowed with a capacity to abruptly terminate this process, this succession. But by the very fact that we are merely the part of this succession process, we inherit a duty along with our rights.

We humans are animals in our needs but we are more than animals in our desires, and our designs to pursue those desires. In pursuit of our individual and group desires, we have turned this beautiful Earth into a miserable place to live in. Our Earth is full – full to the brim – of Nature’s bounties. These Nature’s loving gifts to us are more than enough to meet our needs, our reasonable needs.

Today we adults know – we know because we have gone to Mars, Moon and peeped into a little bit of the interiors of this mysterious universe – that we are extremely lucky. We know that our Earth is exceptionally fortunate in the matters of its placement around its star – Sun – and of the carving out a niche of habitable dot in an otherwise hostile and barren universe.

Today we have the capacity to destroy this dot by making it place full of violence (in the name of God), barren of resources (in the name of development), inhospitable to life (in the name of creating wealth and prosperity), full of rival artificial creatures (by manufacturing them with Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering) or even a barren chunk of mere rock (by exploding atomic bombs).

In the hot-pursuit of our ‘man-made ideals’ – and without realizing that we are yet to develop an ethics that may safely handle the volatile consequences of our such capacity – we are turning this planet into a more and more risky place to live in. It is a crime against our children, to which we owe a solemn duty to provide a place better than we inherited. We inherited a place afflicted with diseases and poverty and we have fought with these curses, and have got victory over them to some extent but we had not inherited a place sitting on the atomic-powder keg. Now what we are passing on to our children is a place more than a place sitting on this powder keg.

Let us resolve in this year 2017 that we shall collectively defeat the violence in the name of God, innovate and improve our ideals of development, wealth, and well-being, and evolve a new human-ethics to guide us. We owe this much duty to our beloved children.