 Cooper Union, what's happening with human rights around our world on ThinkTech Live, broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, Moana, New York. Today's episode is focusing on peace and human rights education for all. Humanity's New Year's resolution is Human Rights Education Article 19, Freedom of Expression for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today I'm joined by two amazing guests and I'm very excited for them to share about the work that they do because peace and human rights education really does serve as one of the most important and imminent New Year's resolutions that must be prioritized and implemented in every school from kindergarten through community centers as well as be at the core of fall form policy for every nation. So human rights education is absolutely crucial as we go forward to ensure a better future for all. Merrill, can you share with us why this issue is so important in international human rights law and how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 19, is central and core to the global arena? Well, if the children all over the planet as well as the grownups and the elderly people become aware that the EDHR was written and has been around for 75 years and congrats the depth of what that is for everybody conceptually and internally will be a better planet as a result. I think it's a very deep, very deep topic because how often do we individually think of the collective that everybody and the relationship we have to everybody and the equanimity of everybody and it's very critical that we learn to do that and become that could become the foundation for humanity of the counteracts, the divisiveness of many other cultural things. So I think vibrationally and I'm a musician of course so I'm into the vibrational. It's a very important vibration that we can collectively create for the whole for all of humanity and not just humanity. One of the things in my experience that happened was a meeting with a pastor Stephen Hamilton. He said, you know, Merrill, this isn't a white man's cut off with a necktie document. You want this to apply to nature as well. And so then we added the line for all creation as a result because we don't just want human rights for human beings. We want human rights for all of creation to honor the nature as well. That's a wonderful point and it's also some of the, it was actually the awarding of the Human Rights Award this year was actually to the coalition on December 10th to the group that organized for the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. So it went to Indigenous Peoples, Youth, Center for International Environmental Law, International New Treaty Council, many NGOs and people's movements that were focusing on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. And of course we just wrapped up COP 28 and people are mobilizing for COP 29 in Azerbaijan. And another point that really is important with what you raised was how we see the rights of nature being enshrined in national courts and you even see the rights of rivers and Wanganui and Aotearoa and also the rights of mountains being declared and created. So really excellent to create this expansion but to make sure that we understand the interdependence especially when we see the world we live in today. Kirsten, can you expand a bit on that incredible introduction by our dear colleague there? I would love to. I love that we can expand kind of infinitely on the ADHR even with 30 articles which seems like a lot. After 75 years we just understand what an incredibly infinitely mind-able idea this is to continue to look for and explore what it really means to have rights and universally that everyone should have. But coming down to article 19 here, I have a lot of favorites and this is definitely among them where everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression. And it's very powerful especially with a lot of the politics that are going on right now. Not just governments who are wanting more and more control and authoritarianism but also businesses and corporations that need to have their idea and their way of expressing things out there in order to survive what we're really talking about is the survival of human beings. And when we come back down to the idea that human beings all have the right to freedom of opinion and expression, that is just the beginning because it asks us to wonder what opinion is and what expression is. We have a lot of people in the world right now who believe that opinions are facts and everybody has a right to their own opinion but not to change the facts. And in terms of expression, it's like who has the right to express their thoughts, their feelings, their ideas. So Merrill and I are both artists which is why we really gravitate to this particular article because that's the work that we do is trying to express things that are more than that are more than someone's agenda. Wonderful. Maybe we can look at first what inspired you Merrill to care about this issue and some of the first campaigns you're involved in around Article 19. Well, I had never heard of the UDHR until I was 33 years old. And fellow, I'll always remember Dr. Carl Schmidhausler called me up one day, he goes, hey, do you have anything for human rights? And I had never heard of it. So I said, I don't. But I have a lot of peace music. Why don't you come over to my house? We can talk about it. I'll show you what I have. We can talk about what you're looking for. And he was in a hurry to get to another meeting when he left. And I said, by the way, what is this human rights thing? And he goes, oh, you know, the right to have food and shelter and education. And I go, I don't know. And I was 33 years old. So what happened later was my dad and I went to the Nutley Public Library and researched and found the document in the somewhere in the library. And he paid 10 cents a page to copy it. And I had this document in my piano bench for several years. And then I put it up on the where you put the sheet music and look at it and think about it. And it was like, how could anybody set this thing to music? It was a big dilemma. It was a real challenge because it's all legalistic things in the writing of it. But I was inspired to write Every Man, Woman and Child because I sort of boiled it down into how do you put this in a simple ballot? We hold these truths only we can make more evident. It's like it's in us and it's up to us to bring it forward, which there you go. If it's in us and we know it innately and only we can make it more evident, that's expression. We can bring it forward from within ourselves. Every living soul is worthy of a deep respect. And that's what I wrote. So it just seemed like very obvious truth and yet not obvious enough. And there wasn't really a blueprint when I was writing the song and going out and teaching it in schools. It wasn't a space anywhere for human rights education. But as a mom, I had to barter for my son's whatever after school or summer camp or I would just offer my services because I couldn't afford the tuition. And so that's kind of where all this involved was the mother of necessity, the mother of invention. Thank you so much. And then getting to Kirsten, what inspired you to care about this issue and some of the first campaigns you were involved in? Well, I have to say that the person who inspired me most was Meryl. Because I had known about human rights. But when I met her, when she walked into my office and asked for help with this, you know, I had never met anyone who had dedicated so much to teaching other people about peace. She's an amazing peace activist and a musical piece activist and she would write songs for children. And I met her about 10 years after she had taken a choir of children from about five Oakland schools to New York to perform her song at the General Assembly of the U.N. I was so moved to see how a young woman could commit herself to educating others through music because it's so difficult to be an artist. It's so difficult to claim your space. It's so difficult to get recognition and respect. It's difficult to perform at a level of excellence. And to see that Meryl, just as a regular person like me, when I educated woman, could take what she, what was inside of her and teach people that to bring out what's inside of them was so inspiring and to really focus on this document and the more that I learned about it, the more inspired I became and the more excited I became to be part of her project. So this is about, it's about 30, 40 years since she created this song, this beautiful song. It was one of, I think it was like the first grassroots musical expression of the UDHR. And so I see Meryl as this pioneer in kind of breaking the way open for so many expressions of the UDHR, so many paraphrasings of it. She was pretty much the, I believe the first person to do that with Elsa Stematopoulou and who took the workshop that she had done with these school children in which they started thinking about human rights and what that meant. And then to align their ideas with the UDHR and to create a song that anybody could perform and engage with all of these texts and all of these articles in their own community through music, which is so emotional. So that's my biggest inspiration. And I'm so honored to work with her on this project. And I'm very excited to be here. Well, and it's also great to hear the name Elsa because we've worked a great deal at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as we focused on the right of nature and looked at Indigenous Peoples' Rights. We're actually upholding many of those aspects of protecting each other, but also our planet, a concept we know here in Hawaii is Malama Honua. And so it's an honor to be able to see the connections, to see how really the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has brought people together and how we've been able to weave around the world in a way a new voice that allows many people to really share how these articles mean so much to them and how they're able to then take articles and actually actualize them in certain ways. And your creative curriculum through freedom of expression is essential for a new way forward to save our world. And Article 19, but also Article 26, combined together to transform global affairs, inspiring people to protect each other and our island earth. And the UDHR provides that power of ideas to initiate change in many countries and through global civil society. As we look at this, maybe this New Year's resolution must be received as a priority for all of humanity. Can you share with us how you actualize this article and what actions you're involved with, beginning with that song, but then what you're doing today as well? I want to share something about the high school orchestration and the professional orchestration of the song, because one of the things that I've been doing recently is sending orchestrated scores to conductors around the country, around the planet, who perhaps might be interested in having the orchestra perform the piece. And that's my goal for the coming years to share what I have, the materials that I have. So I had sent, well, also there's a link that I've been sharing with people. We had the world premiere of the high school orchestra last spring at a local school where I was working. And the children at the school are multilingual. And I love that you can always, because the document is the most translated of all the documents on the planet. And you can have students in a group who speak Vietnamese and Ethiopian and all kinds of exotic languages that we incorporated into that performance. So I've been happy to share the link to that with the high school orchestra premiere and want to get just more and more high school orchestras. And one of the things that came as a realization of that event was that the social studies teachers were packed with other curriculum. They could not fit it into their classrooms. The administrator who helped me create the world premiere of the orchestration said, no, you cannot go knocking on the doors of my history department, my social studies department, my English department, you can only work with the music department. So I realized that the beauty of the song is if you don't have space in a curricula for an educational institution to add, and it's very sad, I would want that every institution that has social studies or any kind of thing that it's relatable to would incorporate that into their curricula. But if it doesn't happen this year, at least they could sing a song and the musicians out there, hey, musicians, hey artists, hey dancers, come on, take it up. We can express this. We could get it on a program. We could sing it for the PTA. We could go out in the community, sing it at the mayor's office. So there you go. Thank you so much. And Kristen, can you share a bit how you're actualizing this important article and how important it is in our communities these days? Well, sure. I mean, specifically to focus on what you're saying about a New Year's resolution, a New Year's resolution to make human rights education front and center, to bring it around. We're absolutely working on that. We're taking this song and expanding it and doing exactly as Merrill said, is making it a completely accessible piece of music to engage in so that it can sort of build a bridge. The human rights education is really taking a huge leap forward in the world right now, trying to create, to make human rights education part of every school curriculum as it should be. But until we get there, exactly as Merrill says, we need these tools to show the community, to show the world how important it is and how beneficial it is. I wrote a book about bullying, called The Bullying and a Doge, right behind me here. And in that, I discovered, I did a lot of research and found out that the thing that always works in anti-bullying education is to engage the whole community in a discussion of human rights. Because once you have everybody really thinking toward what human rights are and how we give them to each other, you're missing the whole point. You're just working on symptoms instead of causes. So just as Merrill said, the power of the universality of this document where it's in all these different languages, and she used the word exotic, but we don't use that anymore because that means like strange and foreign. But any country, every language is exotic to someone, and even English is exotic to some people. But this song, which is published in English, it creates a space for writing, for reading in all languages. And Merrill invites musicians from around the world to make their own recordings of this song in whatever languages they have. So there's this huge opening in these empty spaces where we can be talking about human rights. I'm putting a link to the page where people can see the resources available. You can teach human rights in a yoga class. I teach them in my Zumba class. There's so many places that music can access that regular curriculum can't. Really good points. And as you described, it reminds me of how I actually spent December 10th on Human Rights Day this year. And it was actually at a concert after a long day of negotiations at the UN Framework Committee on our Climate Change COP. And in the meeting, there was a brief concert, and it was the drummer of guns and roses, which you probably would never think would be the human rights one. But they were singing the song, knocking on heaven's door, talking about a way that we get to a new realm of reality where the world would be better, and you would hold the mic into the audience. And the first voice that came out was a young indigenous woman from the Amazon, because he's working a lot on protecting nature and focusing on our lungs of the planet in the Amazon. So she's saying it in the Yanomami language. And then over 40 different people saying knocking on heaven's door as they handed the mic around the crowd. So it's one of those examples of what you're sharing, though. But as you're saying, the universality of the UDHR, because the UDHR has been translated over 500 languages, even Olaloha Hawaii as well. We worked on that with educators. And as you're saying, having those discussions, discussing what these rights mean, and how we are actually making sure we actualize the articles is so crucial. And there's a great Bob Marley quote as well that says, the greatness of a person is not how much wealth one acquires, but in one's integrity and one's ability to affect those around one positively. And I think that really is what the UDHR is. It's that collective aspect of how we can work together to make sure that all these rights become a reality in everyone's daily living. And many New Year's resolutions receive priority for a brief moment. But peace and human rights education requires a new commitment to the promise for this resolution for more revolution. And I think Article 19 focused on everyone has that right to freedom of opinion, as you've been sharing. Maybe you could share a bit some other NGOs you think that are great champions that you've seen that are very creative in human rights education and around Article 19. Mara, that has that. And then we can move into our final part about our personal visions for the future of this important right. Well, I think we're aware the HREUSA with Christie and Hailey. And they've been very active and it's wonderful to be a part of that group. That's the Human Rights Educators of the United States of America. And also Felicia Tibbetts with the HREA, the Human Rights Educators Association. And I wasn't aware of all these groups until 2003. And just historically as a reference, I was doing this work in 1986. That's when I started working on my song and getting performances of it. And our show at the United Nations on Human Rights Day was 1987. And then after that, I worked with Elsa on the paraphrase chart for about a year. And then we did something in 1988 in San Francisco for Amnesty International. Many years went by where it seemed like there wasn't anybody interested. So I didn't push it. But then in 2003, I came across an event in New York hosted by Amnesty International, which was a gathering. And my dear husband sent me as a supportive gift to New York so I could attend. And there were people there that all were working in this human rights education field that had come up since the time that that I was, you know, sort of giving up on it all. And then I met Felicia Tibbetts and I met a woman I, oh yeah, Nancy Flowers was at that event. Yeah, and people that I've been connected with ever since then that's very exciting to know that there's been these movements that have gotten going and that get into schools as they're capable of and they have workshops and they have trainings and they have all kinds of wonderful opportunities for people to get involved and be part of a bigger community. So anyway, that's just something I'm grateful for. Thank you so much. And really all the people you're mentioning are really the goddesses of good human rights education. You see HRE USA, but Felicia is unbelievable in the work that she does out of Columbia Teachers College. And Nancy Flowers anytime I'm in San Francisco, always go there to meet with her and get inspiration. And definitely we've done a lot of work in San Francisco but also in New York. So covering both coasts to make sure the world is aware of those 30 articles at the UDHR, not just on the 75th but on a daily basis. Moving now to Kirsten, maybe you can share as well some champions you're aware of. I wish I had known you were going to ask this question because there's so many that I can think of and I'm specifically thinking of like a lot of youth powered movements right now and Indigenous rights movements. And you know I'm just I think about the water the water keepers and and the sunshine youth and and I and all of the all the people working in education, there's so many great, I mean I'm in Oakland California and I can't even and the list is as long as my arm about the people who are working to do good here and Segura Tay land trust is getting a lot of mention internationally and I'm so proud to be able to work with them. But I know we're out of time and I just wanted to say that I hope in you know next year or the cop after that people will be singing every man, woman and child all together or every living soul, which is the the non-gendered version of this of this song and check it out. It's just really beautiful and it's just the beginning for what we can start to do and sing about and feel and accomplish together. Thank you so much and that really is important because it actually looks at the important movements such as 350.org and this has the new new Hmong mayor and we just celebrated Hmong New Year. So Hmong culture and rights absolutely crucial but it's great to see a Hmong mayor in Oakland. So it's exciting to see how dynamic and how that Hmong mayor will actually bring human rights to reality to be the voice for people that maybe haven't been heard for a long time and that's why Article Artine is so crucial. It's one of the most important rights in the world. It focuses on everyone who has that right to freedom of opinion and expression includes that freedom to hold opinions without interference and seek received and impart information and ideas through any media especially music which is so powerful and beyond all the frontiers. So I thank you both for joining. This has been Cooper Union on Think Tech Hawaii and it's an honor to host this show. We'll see you again next week and thank you so much for watching and I'm your host Joshua Cooper Aloha and Aolimake Hikiyo. Happy New Year.