by Sue Ann Teo

Created on: October 04, 2009

Rights, a word that can bring rumpus to the world's economy, stir a peaceful country into chaos and imprison a person for life and yet, the best marketing strategy of all time of the government to earn the supports from the people. This is not because, rights is what the government can offer, but because it is the fantasy that the people choose to believe in. For centuries, when the people mutually agree to the social contract they have had agree to create and submit to government for the purpose of establishing for themselves, safety and public order (The Social Contract Theory).

Apparently being a part of the same species, the seemingly odd that most the people do not seem to understand or accept one of the human nature characteristic of greed for power. Power can only be obtained with the right amount of sovereignty given by the people. Sovereignty is an accumulated rights agreed to be given up by the citizens. And once the power is obtained, it is no doubt that it would be nearly impossible to let go.

This, however, does not means that we should not continue to fight for our rights, fighting, as I do agree, is the only way that we can keep the check and balance of the government. But one tricky thing about fighting for the rights, from my opinion, is that we have to take a certain stand, hypocritically.

Being involved in the feminist movement for nearly three years now, I can never bring myself to put on the label as a feminist. As a matter of fact, I have only been introduced to the issue of rights when I was pursuing my Bachelor degree in the university. Though it has already been five years since I graduated, I have never stopped learning about rights. Currently, as a part of the research group on gender studies, it has become clearer to me that, the issue of rights has never been real.

The truth struck me that all these movements about human rights, women's rights, children rights has never been realistic. While thousands of people are on the streets to fight for their basic rights of expression and information, there are other thousands more died on the other side of the globe simply hoping to get a mouthful of food.

Come to think of it, I supposed those people branding themselves as the civil society know very well that they are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites sharing the same interests. For this, the human rights people will never questioned about the rights of the animals, which had been tortured or being brutally killed to be ended up on their

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