I realized that I didn’t know the Russian word for “entitlement” or “entitled.” Google translate said the former was a right, while the latter had the sense of being empowered.
It seems fitting that I had no idea how to say either in Russian. If language reflects daily life, and if daily life informs language, there is an obvious fit between the daily life in the USSR and the absence of a word for “entitlement.” Which begs a questions or two.
Does “entitlement” really mean “right”? And if it does, why are we so reluctant to claim ours? It seems that whatever we don’t claim, will be claimed by someone else, because nature abhors a vacuum, or a perceived vacuum. You blink, and your right to breathe clean air and drink clean water is no longer yours; turn away for a moment, and voting isn’t really your prerogative; give in to your wish for a calm quiet life, and there goes your right to make decisions for your body; spend a few moments thinking about their argument, and here is a bullet for you and for you and for you. I am thinking that the aggression to arbiter rights far outstrips the impulse to just have a life. It’s true; if it weren’t, why would we need wars and violence?
Why does culture dissuade us from claiming rights, what is truly ours? Because culture is determined by power. And power is self-preserving. So allowing us to have the power to claim the space we need in the world strikes power as encroachment. Because power likes to control and usurp to the extent it is allowed to do so. You know what they say about power and corruption. Power for power’s sake is the same as money for money’s sake — empty and perverse. But also, well, powerful.
Is it heretical to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an organic right, that is if we don’t claim it, and commit to claiming it every day?
The young apply the language of decolonization to their lives, their brains, their beings. It actually makes sense in this context, where what is perceived not to be claimed can be taken over, which amounts to colonization. Isn’t this what happened to this continent, land that seemed unclaimed, or not claimed fervently enough, by the colonizer’s standards? Isn’t this what Russia is trying to do, though perhaps Ukraine is showing what it looks like to claim your entitlement fervently enough?
I am going to claim my entitlement here and now, my right to exist, my right to come home to the person I love, irrespective of gender; to raise my children in a religion (or absence of one) of my/their choice; to read books that I want to read; to write what and how I see fit; to believe science; to use my rhetorical skills to help those who need it. To ask for help from allies.
It’s time. They are coming for all of us. Just because you don’t have a body that can get pregnant, don’t think for a second they won’t get to you. Just because your spouse is of opposite gender, don’t think they won’t get to you. Just because you practice the right religion, don’t think they won’t get to you. Just because your skin is white, don’t think they won’t get to you. They will, and, as the saying goes, who will be there to speak up on your behalf?
Trust me. I was born and grew up in the USSR; there is a pattern to how these things go.
Please, speak up, make yourselves heard, make it known that you feel entitled, that we feel entitled, that we will not recede into the woodwork while they ransack us. Stand up for one another. There are more of us than there are of them. Save democracy. Save each other.