The Earth’s Human Rights Day, December 10, might be an appropriate time to consider the following…

Assuming there are 400 billion galaxies and about 250 billion stars in each galaxy in the universe, it is not too far-fetched to imagine there is not only life on many planets circling stars throughout the universe but also “thoughtful life”.   If so, it might also be possible that a Community of Universal Thoughtful Species might send the following letter to the people of the Earth….

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Dear Earth,

Good day, I am your representative from the Community of Universal Thoughtful Species, and I bring you greetings from Us All. As you are interested in sharing our Cumulative Knowledge, we have a couple of questions to ask you first, questions that would be obvious to any responsible membership manager.

How are you going to get along with 10 trillion other species in our community if you do not respect even your own? If you permit yourselves to treat your own kind so despicably, why would we grant you the power and reach to treat others as badly?

Moreover, if you do not have the highest respect for the natural bounty that has befallen you, if you do not protect and nurture it for all you are worth, why would we afford to you the means to abuse as badly similar treasures elsewhere?

Respect for yourselves and for the natural bounty that has befallen you are minimums of awareness; the absence of either indicates a spirit that we will never permit to be exported into our jurisdiction. When that has happened over the last several hundred million (of your Earth) years, it has always ended badly. We have had eons of experience with species like yours. Our experience overwhelmingly dictates that species of your social maturity must never be permitted anything more than a sophomoric knowledge of astrophysics and cosmology, much less the Cumulative Knowledge of the Community of Universal Thoughtful Species.

Why? Because power combined with selfishness and other childish traits only perpetuates and increases abusiveness. You need only imagine yourself a mother with your fly-bitten infant dying malnourished in your arms while your breasts yield nothing but desert dust. Then take an honest look at your whole world.

However, power combined with compassion opens the door to infinite wealth, of all categories. In this case, unfortunately, examples exist in your world, if at all, only in your future. There may now be some limited, exclusive examples, but that is the point—until they encompass All, they are no example at all. Our Universe is vastly resplendent with such examples of infinite wealth. And if you are smart, you might want to join us and see.

The “concept” that he who gathers owns is about as evolved as the concept of slavery. If this is the height to which you aspire, the Universe will be better off without you.

By behaving in a way that is respectful of ethics, however, you may take the miraculous bounty that has befallen you and make your Eden. But that requires courage. Because it will not happen unless you Love Your Planet and Manage Your Pricks.

My research informs me that your English word “prick,” though ill-mannered by some measure in proper company, is still your most precise and most commonly understood descriptor for persons who are completely selfish, who love to play people to their own advantage and who don’t feel the slightest reluctance to break hearts. The importance of my communication with you today is so great that I must risk decorum to ensure precision and common understanding.

And so, yes, “Pricks.”

Love your Planet and Manage Your Pricks. Commitment to these two precepts demonstrates appreciation of, and for, what it is that has befallen you. They are minimum prerequisites. Were we to empower you now with our knowledge, we would be empowering the thoughtless selfishness that currently runs wild on Earth. We will not have you out here in the stars taking natural bounty for granted and wreaking your selfish havoc.

Without these prerequisites, it will be lose-lose for all of you. The victims of the injustices will lose, and the perpetrators will always feel insecure and at least vaguely horrified, if only in their sleep. They will not know why they feel this way and will medicate themselves against their feelings with materialism, power and other fleeting, unearned comforts, until all is lost. As an unavoidable consequence, all of you on Earth will be left to stew in your own juices, as have trillions of ignorant species before you, never to learn the lessons that it takes to save and to love your lives, never to learn for reaching your expiry too soon.

The ultimate irony is that most of the lessons that you need to learn, and could have learned but have not, are things that you have already been taught. Yes, we have been watching.

Those lessons may be summarized in one short sentence: Every thoughtful being is entitled to Universal Rights.

They are different from what you call “human rights” in that Universal Rights are accorded to All, whereas you accord your “human rights” only to those in particular countries (and even then, usually not to all). “Human rights” that are only accorded to some, in particular countries are, at best, country club rights. You do not admit all humans into your “free countries,” so, for most humans on your Earth, these rights are only available where most humans are not welcome—in your exclusive country clubs.

You have not earned the standing to call them “human rights” until you accord them to all humans. Universal Rights include:

• Respect for and security of the person;
• Food, clothing and shelter;
• Access to the tools of self-improvement, health care, basic capital and justice; and
• A healthy environment.

This basket of rights may be summed up as Freedom.

As sure as they are taken for granted by all members of your country clubs, they are a birthright, and thus an entitlement, of Us All, equally, everywhere. Every thoughtful being is entitled to Freedom. These Universal Rights may not be taken for granted until you Manage Your Pricks. Pricks are the only reason Universal Rights are not ubiquitous.

It is not merely our right to accord Universal Rights to All. It is our responsibility.

“Accord,” your English transitive verb, is—but is not only—“to bestow”; it is also “to make agree, to make correspond, or to make adapt.” Thus, to accord to a person their Universal Rights, it must also be assured that their experience corresponds with their rights. Forgive us if we seem presumptuous, but these are your words. You, not us, have given them their meaning.

As has been heard by many of you since you were children, Rights and Freedom come at a very high cost. “The highest cost,” you were told quite earnestly. Those words were truer even than your teachers knew. They thought they meant the cost of giving up their lives fighting for Freedom in wars. It includes that. But it is a price much higher, unfortunately, even than that.

The true cost of Freedom is the responsibility to accord that same Freedom, all Universal Rights, to All.  All means everybody, not with-standing the private interests of all Pricks and advantage takers, and all those who act in their service, including ourselves. It is not merely a payment due upon death but comes due again every moment our freedom continues. The dues of Liberty arise daily, and persist throughout our days of Freedom. As beneficiaries of Freedom, we must pay as we go. To earn Freedom, we must strive daily to fulfill the responsibility to accord Freedom to All. It is a simple irony. Liberty never becomes free. Once All are Free, then we all must be kept that way. Free people are responsible for what they know but do not oppose. Liberty is not self-executing.

Only Pricks take and abuse advantage unto themselves. Anyone who is satisfied enjoying their own “freedom,” but is careless about what others less fortunate must endure, has not earned Freedom but has merely taken liberties. Prickness is not subjective. It is the failure to pay the true cost of Freedom, the abuse of Universal Rights to our personal advantage, thereby diminishing the Universal Rights of others without their consent. This diminishment of others’ rights is what distinguishes hoarding Pricks from those merely making good money.

The epithet is well merited not only by those who take advantage but also by all those who either share in the advantage taken or act in the service of advantage takers. You may not be a heartless perpetrator yourself, but you may still take much delight in the dividends heartless perpetrators pay. This is but one of the mechanisms whereby Prickness extends to its shareholders, employees and customers.

Although most of your country club members do not, themselves, procure slaves, abuse workers or poison environments, they engage in economic activity that benefits from those behaviors. Ninety percent of the leather worn in your shoes, belts and jackets, or used for handbags and wallets to carry your money, was tanned in South Asia, where people, who are the same as any of us, work submerged above their breasts in tanning fluids that have been banned elsewhere on Earth for forty years. They stir the hides in the tanning chemicals with their legs and soft heels because sticks and paddles are too rough on the delicate leathers. Similar travesty yields gold, diamonds, chocolate, most hydrocarbons, chemicals, rare earths, minerals, manufactured goods and much else from your “developing world.”

Universal Rights are crushed under the necessity of your cheap and convenient energy, leather coats and shoes, jewelry, electronic devices, tires, runway fashions and runaway jet fuel. It is no wonder that, although you may care about slavery, you do not notice this so much. It is easy to be seduced and confused by advantage.

Every person is entitled to Universal Rights. America and Earth’s other constitutional democracies have come very close to understanding rights. They fall short only in extent and in scope. As free people, it is our responsibility to accord these Universal Rights to All. Very often, our only way is against the whingeing and griping of Pricks. But nevertheless, to act is not merely our choice, nor is it just a preference. It is our duty as free persons.

The natural bounty that has befallen you Earthlings is not merely an astonishingly beautiful planet but also one that functions so magnificently well as to give rise to you and to provide sustenance for you and for all of your descendants. You only deserve it if you conserve it. But your descendants deserve it even if you do not. The responsibility is inescapable. Only behavior is optional.

The chances of having both such a planet and consciousness, as Earthlings do, may be one in 10 billion stars. Those odds are miraculous. Permitting Pricks to lay to waste Earth’s miraculous eternal capacity in the service of their own selfishness at the expense of the birthright of yourselves and your descendants is a gross abrogation of one’s responsibility to their place, to their kind and to their kindness.

Now you see – you may allow your tiny planet and all who are upon it to go to hell; we in the Community of Universal Thoughtful Species will neither save you nor stop you. But we have timeless experience that requires us to ensure that your kind, who have not learned these first lessons of respect and responsibility, never be permitted to reach the stars.

Rest assured that we live up to our responsibilities. There are none like you out here. We have managed all of our Pricks, and we ensure that Universal Rights are accorded to All eternally.

As the wise among you will realize, the very phenomenon that you are not already overrun by alien Pricks is proof of the fact. Ask why there has been no radio contact and you may as well ask why there have been no smoke signals or jam-can-on-a-string telephone calls. The reason you have not heard from us before now is not because we couldn’t. And it’s not because communication is limited by the speed of light. That limitation depends on an understanding of physics that is new to you in your mother’s lifetime. To your present understanding, “radio waves”—light—are as fast as you’ve got. Yet quantum entanglement, what your Einstein called “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” or “spooky action at a distance,” seemed to have instantaneous effect across unlimited space over no time at all, absolutely in the same moment. In the next hundred years, you will learn as much as you did in the last five thousand. I think it still may be a bit early for you to declare there is no means in the physical universe except radio waves to communicate across vast space.

The reason you haven’t heard from us is, until you embrace awareness, we couldn’t be bothered—the same reason you don’t call your annoying acquaintance who only gets in touch when they want money.

Learn to pay the fair costs of your Liberty, and learn to respect your natural bounty. If you do not, you will never meet us. If you do not, who would ever want to meet you?  Or, of course, if you choose, you may live in peace and bounty practically forever.

With all due respect, you only get this Letter once.

 Sincere best wishes,

Your Representative from the Community of Universal Thoughtful Species

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FROM: Lefebvre, John. All’s Well: Where Thou Art Earth and Why (pp. 34-44). John Lefebvre Press. Kindle Edition.