Oren Lyons on Rights and Responsibilities

Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons comments on the missed opportunity in American history to base the nation on responsibilities rather than individual rights — in this collection of film interview outtakes from "Standing on Sacred Ground."

[lpoplpop-hrjt]

"Who's your teacher - nature, the Earth, you learn, you learn, and you learn how to get along." On June 8, 1789, why did Madison rise to speak before the House in favor of the Bill of Rights? The answer: as a way of learning how to get along. Learning, like history, is a living experience. At the time Madison spoke, there were Anti-Federalists concerned about the loss of liberty under the proposed Constitution. The people of Rhode Island and North Carolina, for example, withheld their ratification until a Bill of Rights was added that would “expressly declare the great rights of mankind secured under this Constitution.” In other words, the insight into the way our forefathers 'learned how to get along' during the debate and passage of the Bill of Rights eludes Chief Oren. To me, his words, while vaguely beautiful, lack an intimacy with the past that becomes the wisdom he seeks to share.

[michaelaiello]

Thank you Chief Oren. I’m doing the best I can to feed the spirits and stay close to our Mother. Blessings to you and your relations for your wisdom and great work which benefits us all. I wish all peoples, entities, creatures some joy and lightheartedness too during this time🌹✨

[e-maikey]

Thank You Maestro! This is what We were taught at a very young age back home in Angola... Afrika ☝🌍🐬

[luvl]

Respect we all lost perspective this helps find our way back

[ximono]

The brilliant philosopher Simone Weil also preferred responsibility rather than rights. I think she would have liked to talk with Chief Oren Lyons. She wrote _The Need for Roots_ towards the end of World War II, along with an essay titled _Draft for a statement of human obligations._ Not human rights.

Wikipedia: The work diagnoses the causes of the social, cultural and spiritual malaise which Weil saw as afflicting 20th century civilisation, particularly Europe but also the rest of the world. 'Uprootedness' is defined as a near universal condition resulting from the destruction of ties with the past and the dissolution of community. Weil specifies the requirements that must be met so that peoples can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment and to both the past and to expectations for the future.

In the book, she writes:
"The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. (…) An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much. (…) A human being left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but would have obligations."

"All human beings are bound by identical obligations, although these are performed in different ways according to particular circumstances. No human being, whoever they may be, under whatever circumstances, can escape them without being guilty of crime; save where there are two genuine obligations which are in fact incompatible, and one is forced to sacrifice one of them."

"The first of the soul’s needs, the one which touches most nearly its eternal destiny, is order; that is to say, a texture of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones."

"A consciousness of the various obligations always proceeds from a desire for good which is unique, unchanging and the same for every human being, from the cradle to the grave."

"The great instigators of violence have encouraged themselves with the thought of how blind, mechanical force is sovereign throughout the whole universe. By looking at the world with keener senses than theirs, we shall find a more powerful encouragement in the thought of how these innumerable blind forces are limited, made to balance one against the other, brought to form a united whole by something which we do not understand, but which we call beauty."

[allrock]

The "internalized struggle" to put a finger upon and to question, and then drive a desire to shift root perceptions upon these structures that where placed there by a leadership system that contains a fundamental flaw in its "source code" is one of the deepest challenges we are going through in todays age,  developing a common "place of expression" to reflect upon and collectively cut through this deep issue and start open dialog upon it is very important in addressing this,   the power of mirror storytelling to touch upon this may be quite a powerful way to address this as it lets us look at the issue from a internal perspective..

[ervrery]

We have no rights. Chief. We not allowed to use are damn language.