Our inalienable rights

You’ve all heard that the basic rights of an American citizen as guaranteed by the Constitution are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Consider this: Sometimes additional steps are needed to ensure our rights.

I’ll start with life. The government grants each citizen the right to life. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Just one small problem, the government does not give us the tools with which to live that life in the best of health. Bring in health care, that must be paid for with the wages earned by working Americans; in other words, without sufficient money you lose your right to life.

A colleague of mine had a boss who could not afford his cancer treatment, and after a few months of lingering in the agony of his disease, he did not have to worry about money anymore because he died. So tell me, how did the government protect his right to life? In order to ensure your right to life is protected, you need to be given the tools with which to stay healthy, but in our society, if you cannot pay, you cannot get better.

Now let’s try liberty. In order to make a living and have the freedom that goes with that paycheck, one has to be educated, and in order to do that, one has to go to school. School is paid for with taxes up until grade 12, but after that, unless you can miraculously come up with some free-ride scholarship, you are on your own. The fact is that most jobs today require a college degree at the minimum, that is, unless you actually want to keep flipping those burgers, and in order to get that degree, you need money. A close friend of mine might have to drop out next semester because her parents, both hard workers but lacking college degrees, just cannot pay the tuition bills anymore.

Do you see a pattern here? The parents don’t have degrees and thus don’t make enough to send their daughter to school, and if she doesn’t get a degree, the cycle will repeat itself. At this point, you should be drawing your own conclusions. Life and liberty make us happy, and if these things are denied to us, how can we be happy?

I suppose the only thing left for us to do is to pursue happiness, and as it continues to elude us, to keep up the pursuit, on and on and on until the time comes for our children to face the denial of basic human rights by our government.

Let it not only be life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, add to the list the right to work, the right to a good education, and the right to free health care. Then we can truly enjoy our freedom.