Respect: Hope for a Global Society

How many times did your parents tell you to respect your elders, or respect other people's beliefs? It seems like my mom was always telling me to respect something. Cornell West, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Kofi Annan, three people worlds apart from one another, are also telling us how important respect is to all of us.

In his essay "Moral obligations of a democratic society" Cornell West highlights the importance of respect, not as it applies to children and their elders, but as a cornerstone of democracy. From the moment we're born we all seek respect, we enter into a "struggle for decency and dignity." The whole journey from childhood to adulthood is about earning our right to be, to justify our own existence. Once that journey is over we have usually gained the respect we seek, if not we keep trying. We do not look for this justification only from ourselves but from our society, and consequently society looks for it from us. It is a two lane street. When this give and take relationship stops working, society stops working, for according to West, "the roots of democracy are fundamentally grounded in mutual respect." Democracy is threatened when the members of society lose respect for each other. Can you add to the growth of a nation if you're too busy judging or blaming people you don't know? Or how productive can you be when society looks at you as someone not fit to be there? I don't respect democracy because it wants me too, I respect other people because I want democracy.

In "No Name Woman" Maxine Hong Kingston shows us the importance of respect by describing the horrors that result from not having any. The authors aunt(pregnant but not by her husband) is driven to suicide by the humiliating and devastating judgement her village passes on her. Rather than seeing a woman, with respect, in need the villagers view her as a disgrace. The morning after her home is destroyed the aunt kills herself and her newborn. Kingston speculates on this story's beginning. First that "woman in the old China did not choose", leading us to believe that the aunt may have been raped. There is no more horrible form of disrespect. The second that the Aunt may have succumb to vanity, and deliberately sought out the attentions of someone else. In this case it is the aunt who disrespects the villagers first. She knowingly disregards the good of the village by seeking out an extramarital affair, a grave sin in her time and place.

Kofi Anan really focuses on the importance of respect in "Nobel Lecture". He mentions a girl born in Afghanistan and the life she has. This life will be lived in a way that most people "would consider inhuman." Part of that inhumanity is that she may never be seen as an equal. The dignity and respect granted to people in other parts of the world may be an idea she only ever hears about. Expounding even further on the importance of respect he talks about human kinds turbulent history. When people stop seeing each other as equals than our past has shown us that violence quickly follows. He drives this point home with a powerful message, "...genocide begins with the killing of one man..." One of our greatest strengths has been to embrace the differences in people as part of their value. Our world becomes more diverse every day and it's only because of our differences that we can keep moving forward. After all once you stop growing you start dying.

I am glad my parents taught me about respect. Their lessons laid the ground work for my entry into an ever changing society. I hope the lessons people like Kingston, West, and Annan teach us will find an even broader audience and have a more profound impact on our future.