"What's That You Say?"

Did you know that in Belfast, your pants are your underwear? As in, the pair of what I call pants that I put on over what I call underwear, here is actually... underwear. This has caused me an enormous amount of confusion over the past few months. For example, I got a free massage the other day, and when leaving me to change the girl said, "Just go ahead and leave your pants on, you can take off everything else." My pants? What a crappy massage that would be! But no, pants are underwear. Underpants. So don't come here and tell someone you like their pants (even if you do), for they will likely look at you like some kind of sexual predator, if not severely misguided weirdo.

But misinterpretations of language can extend well beyond seemingly innocent things like pants vs. panties vs. underwear vs. trousers. Any word can be bent to mean what the speaker intends. A word that to one person stands for something good and worthwhile for another signifies the extreme depth of evil and darkness. People can shout the same words at each other, each meaning something different, until two communities living side by side no longer understand one another, if they ever did.

Human rights. I had always thought it would be difficult to find someone in the Western world who could look me in the eye and with a straight face tell me that human rights weren't something positive, something everyone could agree upon, a good place to start when no other political solutions seem viable. But today, I learned that there are some people that believe the idea of human rights doesn't apply to them - not only does it not apply to them, but they see the spread of the value put on human rights as an affront and a threat to everything they believe in.

I've always thought of human rights as meant to be universal - they're not to be applied only to on group or another. One group claiming their human rights does not necessarily disenfranchise another from theirs. It's not like pie, where there's an infinite number of slices, and if you shout loud enough Grandma might give you a bigger piece than your little cousin. It's not like the policeman has to hit a certain amount of people, so if he doesn't hit your neighbor because your neighbor complains about his human rights being violated, the policeman's not going to come and hit you to fill his quota. So why, if one group of people is drawing attention to the fact that they are forced to live in squalor, demanding that their fundamental human rights are met, can you not stand up and do the same?

written by

ebienelson on April 30, 2009 from Belfast, United Kingdom

from the travel blog: "She is the Belle of Belfast City..."

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