Dignity & Deserving

Who gets 'voted off the island' of humanity? Who deserves help?

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1. All people have inherent dignity and worth and are entitled to the equal protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms without discrimination of any kind. (Australian Department of Health & Aged Care)

and

Deserve
verb: deserve; if someone or something deserves something, it is right that they should have it, because of the way they have behaved or because of what they are
(Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries)

So, according to my federal government and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all people deserve - and have - inherent dignity. Dignity is a word with a lot of definitions, and I’ve seen articles that list multiple types of dignity, including ‘universal human dignity (Menschenwürde), which “cannot be lost as long as the persons exist” according to Prof. Lennart Nordenfelt in Sweden. I really hope Prof. Nordenfelt is right about that.

And still… notions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ pop up, especially when our Prime Minister was a member of a church known for its Prosperity Gospel. You can move a lot of product when you convince the buyer they deserve to have things and other people don’t, even better that those people are hardly people at all. Thus we all deserve tax cuts and we are, apparently, willing to pay for them by cutting welfare to those in need.

I vividly recall my late friend, Dr Victoria Emery (of blessed memory), saying, “I would so much rather get what I want than what I deserve. Its a brave or terminally stupid person who can demand exactly what they deserve.”

We all deserve safety. We all deserve bodily integrity. We all deserve medical care and a social safety net that provides food, housing and medical care without humiliation. We deserve adaptations to our physical and mental needs in school, work and in our built environment. We deserve to remain part of humanity even if we become old, ill or demented.

We all deserve to live in a world where our basic human dignity is inalienable. If that means I have to suffer offering that minimum dignity to a**holes like a certain military aggressor, a defeated political leader who can’t acknowledge reality or a Christian ex-prime minister who hasn’t read Matthew 25: 37-40, well, I’ll do that. I have to respect their humanity, not their views.

Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.

Over to You

• What help do you deserve? Are you getting it?

• What, if anything, makes a person undeserving of help? Do you truly believe that, or is it something you picked up from the culture you grew up in?

• When you read or hear a discussion about the fat, the poor, the disabled or immigrants/refugees, ask yourself: is their human dignity

  being respected? How would I feel if someone treated me as less than human? Who benefits from stereotyping ‘people like that’?