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| Credit: International Network of Liberal Women |
Yet, as I live my life here in Paris, having completed a Master's degree focusing on human rights at the end of last year while at the same time undergoing a heart surgery, I contemplate what human rights means to me personally versus others. How much overlap is there between developing versus developed nations? How can I fully live within and access my own rights in a country that is not even my own? What I have come up with as I train in the park near my pink cottage, sending resume after resume, networking, flying to Rome to be with my French boyfriend who works for the United Nations and is also seeking long-term employment in his own country, trying to build the rest of a dream after significant resiliency most of my life, is how blurred the line is between those in need of accessing and fully realizing human rights standards. These are the people I love, live near, and work alongside.
The past few days the American news has been shaped by an announcement that AOL had reversed a decision regarding 401ks to its employees after a media frenzy regarding CEO Tim Armstrong's comment that,
Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.The mother of the "distressed baby," Novelist Deanna Fei, published an eloquent and very brave response to her husband's employer in Slate magazine. Her husband, Peter S. Goodman, is the Executive Business and and Global News Editor of AOL's Huffington Post. The Goodmans are known to me because Arnold and Elise Goodman, the grandparents of the "distressed baby" girl, were the couple who gave me very my first job in publishing when I was nineteen years old. I worked from their home as their Literary Agency Assistant, and the position was a lifelong dream for this rural girl from a chaotic childhood with little resources earning and financing my undergraduate degree in Manhattan. I filed their contracts, letters to their children, answered their phone calls from the authors of the What to Expect When You're Expecting series, sent out rejection letters, and learned about publishing from two people who had made a wonderful life from it. They had a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two wonderful children, and to my young eyes they were living the good life.
Enter the life of their own grandchild. As an advocate for children's health, I was aghast reading the AOL CEO's comment but was not surprised. The state of healthcare in my own country is one of the most brutal abuses of rights in a wealthy and developed nation that exists. So is the cost of education. Enter where I live currently so as to actually complete a Master's degree before I turned 35. When I had my heart surgery last year, I was also a student who paid nothing to have that surgery. I had suffered from supraventricular tachycardia since I was seventeen years old but still went on to race ultramarathons and build running teams in support of women and children's health. But around the end of 2012, as my hormones shifted and I worked freelance while earning my degree and trained teams of ex-pat runners, I began to have heart episodes much more frequently. When my sisters' were visiting me last March and I looked up at my baby sister's worried face sprawled on a Parisian sidewalk in full-on tachycardia, I began to think the time had come to fix my heart. Then I read online that when I am pregnant someday my baby would also go without oxygen and experience the same horrendous effects I did when the tachycardia occurred plus it could affect the child's development; I knew it was time to have heart surgery.
