Human values are universal

Labor unions’ pundits and knee-jerk human rights advocates have hurled their self-righteous definition of human rights against working children in developing countries strictly from a political standpoint.

Their incoherent viewpoints, including Congressman George Miller’s, speak of “American Values” premised on a westerner’s pair of lenses. Their often hypocritical assertions almost always never take into account the real essence of values.

Comically ironic too is their inability to realistically assess if they could take a dosage of their own rhetoric if only to find out the emptiness of what they preach. They are long on the employment of the convenient facade of human rights, but awfully short in providing realistic alternatives for the millions of children who work in third world country factories to put food on the table.

If in fact do-gooders like liberal social democratic Congressman George Miller are true to their human rights commitment, they would have graciously, through aid to poor countries, provide these young children with opportunities to acquire lifetime skills with Herculean conviction. But it seems that they have limited their definition of human rights to the whimsical political agenda of monied and big labor unions at the expense of young children who take up backbreaking jobs to feed themselves.

All these willful negativity while thousands of young migrant children head to the farm fields at dawn throughout farmlands across the country to pick fruits and vegetables while their privileged peers head to class to acquire lifetime skills. All these while national leaders were glued to their chairs upon hearing tidings of young children and women being imported into 21st Century America to work as prostitutes and indentured slaves.
Isn’t this a classic case of the Glass House Syndrome Congressman Miller? Excuse me, sir, did you say yes?

While Miller preaches human rights, he simultaneously uses aged-old information to continue browbeating the NMI impervious to the progressive strides that we have taken over the last several years to improve employee work conditions. Miller has ran out of decent ammunition while he dons the hat of a fat ostrich looking the other way on human rights violations of greater magnitude right in the heart of the land of the free. It dwarfs his propped-up research on the case of Bangladeshis here, victims of a Filipino-American employer who abandoned them several years ago and now in hiding in Manila.

Congressman Miller, it is time that you expand your definition of values to every corner of the world. Values is supposed to “enhance and enrich” the livelihood of our brothers and sisters throughout the global community.
Superficial infliction of economic hardship at any level and against any group of humankind isn’t my definition of the very essence of universal values. Congressman Miller, it’s time you exit your Hermit Crab Syndrome. It’s sad to see you shrink into your fragile shell when faced with perceptual danger.

Finally, this group of US Citizens comprised of Chamorros and Carolinians have never displaced anyone. We only want what rightfully belongs to us as US Citizens though saddened by the constant trumpeting of the “economic good times” in mainstream America that never descended in these islands. To put teeth or credibility to your claim as a human rights advocate, you should have insisted on the lame duck Clinton administration to ensure that the country’s robust economy reaches every American community. But you failed us in this regard. Don’t you think it’s time to reinvent your ways so to give truth to your human rights claim?