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The As A Student Of Human Rights

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An environment that would be supportive of dying in our culture for me, conjures up strange, science-fiction imagery of incubation chambers filled with pure oxygen, and deadpan people in white coats walking around with clip boards offering condolences in pill-form to the grieving person. Isolate the disruption (i.e. sad people) and placate it (i.e. medicate). The reason for this absurd notion is simply that I’m not sure our culture specifically can create an environment through social modifications or institutions that are supportive of dying -- we are incredibly technologically reliant and socially isolated that our first instinct when dealing with something that disrupts the status quo is to sweep it into a corner and cover it up somehow. This, I suppose, indicates that one of the first structural changes that could be useful in this regard would be to drop the notion that we are free agents. As a student of Human Rights, I have often experienced significant cognitive dissonance surrounding the deified rhetoric of individual autonomy that rests on a pedestal in our neoliberal culture, in contrast to my personal beliefs in communitarianism wherein the health of the collective is more important than a single component. One theme that emerged in our course discussion was that humans are in desperate need of community, but our social structure dictates that community is not a priority -- our main objective is to produce and acquire, and through this misguided and rather

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