Since this doesn't really reply to anyone's specific points, I figured I'd just post this separately in the thread.
I've recently realized that pretty much all of the conflicts we see are where two sides 'rights' come in conflict with each other. Back before there were rules, I'm sure there was one group that thought killing other humans was just fine and it was their right. Another group just wanted to live their lives without being worried about being killed by other humans, and it was their right to do so. When those groups came in conflict their 'rights' didn't match so a rule had to be made - in this case, 'the right to live is more important than the right to kill others'. So we now have laws against murdering others. What I think people miss is that 'rights' are really nothing but a construction of societal norms and laws built up over years. You have the right to not be killed (life). But it could have just as easily been "you have a right to kill anything you want, including other humans". Of course, I have a feeling that a society with that as a right might not have a long lifecycle... As time has progressed, more and more things have moved into the realm of 'rights'. Right to free speech, right to peacefully assemble, and so on. In our current situation, there seem to be several 'rights' being fought over right now. Whether my desire to not wear a mask is more important than the desire of society to reduce the transmission of a virus. Whether the color of your skin should determine if you are more or less likely to be shot or abused by a police officer in some areas. And on and on and on. If you look at the civil rights movement, a lot of the protests (peaceful or violent) came about where 'rights' were in conflict. For example, the rights of black people to be non-segregated vs the rights of the white people to not want black people to share their facilities/businesses. At some point, there is going to be conflict and disagreement. In an ideal society, one would hope that you could come to an agreement that both sides would at least be equally unhappy about without resorting to protests and civil disobedience. But when you're the party who's perceived rights are being trampled on, it's kinda hard to get the people who are doing the trampling to listen, since you'd end up trampling on their rights if things changed. In this circumstance, often some sort of protest or refusal to go along with the societal norms is unfortunately needed to bring the topic up to the light. Thus you saw the lunch counter sit-ins and the freedom riders and similar. The ignition for a lot of the current events seems to be the George Floyd death. This is obviously a conflict between the perceived rights the police officers believed they had, and the right of a black man to not be killed at the hands of those officers. And obviously, this has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There are a lot of these types of conflicts going on right now... one doesn't have to look very far to find some. I think to bring this back to another point of this discussion made by others, it seems like a lot of this country has lost the ability to stop and listen to both sides to understand what 'right' it is that the other side thinks is more important than your right you're not happy with being curtailed. And to come to some sort of reasonable agreement.
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