Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi), was born 140 years ago today. Gandhi’s birthday is commemorated as a national holiday in India as Gandhi Jayanti, and is celebrated around the world as the International Day of Non-Violence. Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience to achieve equal rights for the Indian community in South Africa, and was later utilized in the fight for land rights for peasants and farmers, women’s rights, and India’s struggle for independence from the British. The use of non-violent civil disobedience has diffused across borders and has been an influential tactic in hundreds of movements worldwide, including the Black Freedom Movement in the United States. Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, less than a year before the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. How have Gandhi’s principles of non-violence, as well as simplicity and economic self-sufficiency, influenced the ideal of human rights? Are they connected, for example, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s caution against the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism?

In Dharamshala and around the world, Tibetans and their supporters take to the streets to protest China’s 60th anniversary. Meanwhile, in Tibet, travel restrictions are in place that ban foreigners and journalists from entry between September 22 and October 8th. What human rights issues are at stake for the Tibetan exiles? Should the Chinese government violate the right to free movement to foreign travelers, even for the purpose of maintaining ’social order?’

September 11 is a precarious date indeed. Since 2001, this date has entered into the realm of memory, both within the minds of individuals and in the construction of a collective U.S. narrative. I say this date is precarious because, in my own experience, my memory from that day- hidden within the sanctuary of my individual being- has come to signify something that is increasingly fractured from the narrative shaped in the mainstream media. I thus find myself almost dreading this anniversary, not only because of the pain I feel for those who suffered, but also because I must confront a dominant memory being forged that claims that this pain is uniquely ‘ours’ and exclusively ‘American.’

However, looking back, the memory of September 11th is also the day I felt the most human- by this I mean that I felt infinitely small, and on equal footing with the rest of the world to the raw vulnerability of human life. These feelings are not uniquely mine, nor are they monopolized by North Americans on September 11. Rather, they are genuine feelings of sorrow, humility, and empathy that human beings feel in the face of tragedy. Yet somehow, it seems that these individual memories are often silenced by the official collective memory, which makes claim to exceptional suffering as a justification for exceptionalism in foreign policy. Ariel Dorfman, the renowned Chilean playwright, captures in his essay “The Last September 11” the universality of pain and the lessons we must learn from the world’s many September 11s, including the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. Dorfman’s argument for the fundamental respect for the equal dignity and value of human life, regardless of the borders in which one lives, is the foundation of universal human rights, and I hope that by rediscovering our individual and deeply personal memories of September 11, 2001, we as a nation of people will begin to remember that feeling of vulnerability and recognize our citizenship in the global community.

The Bombing of La Moneda in Chile; September 11, 1973