| Here’s one more item for you, the last in our civics book: rights. |
| Boy, everyone in this country is always running around, yammering about their fucking rights. |
| I have a right. |
| You have no right. |
| We have a right. |
| They don’t a have right. |
| Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but there’s no such thing as rights, OK. |
| They’re imaginary. |
| We made them up, like the Boogie Man, the Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. |
| Rights are an idea. |
| They’re just imaginary. |
| They’re a cute idea. |
| Cute but that’s all. |
| Cute and fictional. |
| But if you think you do have rights let me ask you this, where do they come from? |
| People say, “Well, they come from God. |
| They’re God-given rights.” |
| Oh, fuck, here we go again. |
| Here we go again. |
| The God excuse. |
| The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, “They came from God.” |
| Anything we can’t describe must have come from God. |
| Personally, folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would have given you the right to some food every day, and he would have given you the right to a roof over your head. |
| God would have been looking out for you. |
| God would have been looking out for you, you know that? |
| He wouldn’t have been worrying about making sure you have a gun so you can get drunk on Sunday night and kill your girlfriend’s parents. |
| But let’s say it’s true. |
| Let’s say God gave us these rights. |
| Why would he give us a certain number of rights? |
| The Bill of Rights in this country has ten stipulations, OK? |
| Ten rights. |
| And apparently, God was doing sloppy work that week because we’ve had to amend the Bill of Rights an additional 17 times, so God forgot a couple of things like slavery. |
| Just fucking slipped his mind. |
| But let’s say God gave us the original ten. |
| He gave the British 13. The British Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. |
| The Germans have 29. The Belgians have 25. The Swedish have only 6. And some people in the world have no rights at all. |
| What kind of a fucking, goddamn, God-given deal is that? |
| No rights at all? |
| Why would God give different people in different countries different numbers of different rights? |
| Boredom? |
| Amusement? |
| Bad arithmetic? |
| Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? |
| Doesn’t sound like divine planning to me. |
| Sounds more like human planning. |
| Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. |
| In other words, business as usual in America. |
| Now, if you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. |
| Next time you’re at the computer, get on the internet. |
| Go to Wikipedia. |
| When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in Japanese Americans 1942, and you’ll find out all about your precious fucking rights, OK? |
| All right. |
| You know about it. |
| You know about it. |
| Yeah. |
| In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. |
| That’s all they did wrong. |
| They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. |
| The only right they had? |
| Right this way, into the internment camps. |
| Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away, and rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. |
| They’re privileges. |
| That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of temporary privileges. |
| And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year, the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter. |
| You see how silly that is? |
| Yeah. |
| Sooner or later, the people in this country are going to realize the government does not give a fuck about them. |
| The government doesn’t care about you or your children or your rights or your welfare or your safety. |
| It simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. |
| It’s interested in its own power. |
| That’s the only thing keeping it and expanding it wherever possible. |
| Personally, when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true. |
| I think either we have unlimited rights or we have no rights at all. |
| Personally, I lean toward unlimited rights. |
| I feel, for instance, I have the right to do anything I please. |
| But if I do something you don’t like, I think you have the right to kill me. |
| So where are you going to find a fairer fucking deal than that? |
| So the next time some asshole says to you, “I have a right to my opinion, “you say, “Oh yeah? |
| Well I have a right to my opinion, and my opinion is you have no right to your opinion.” |
| Then shoot the fuck and walk away. |
| Thank you. |