Benjamin Franklin, American founder and inventor, said “Failing to plan is a plan to fail.” 
The heart of Unite for Rights is a “plan for humanity.”
The plan is an international social movement, a renewed “overstory” as Malcolm Gladwell calls it, embodied in the four figures of the Unite for Rights brand: the moment when people, nonprofits, businesses and governments unite to tell the story of rights for all, enforceable by all, in the courts of all countries.
We have advances in Medicine, Physics, Psychology, Computer Science, Food, Music, Biology, Environmental Science…this list is long, and growing. Law and Democracy should be on this list.
Law is an agreement to live together. It can be a local town ordinance, a state or national statute, or an international treaty. All are agreements to on how we will live together. The problem humans face is that the stories we are telling are much smaller than our existence together.
Human rights organizations, religious institutions, businesses and governments are dancing on the periphery. And I’ve been dancing with them: but the problems we face, nuclear war, the destruction of our biosphere, emergence of AI beyond our control, and the breakdown of family as a core human institution, all require broader thinking and a better, bigger, story for us to tell each other. The remarkable gift that humans have, unique to them, no other species, is that humans can read and write. 
We can put our agreements to live together, a new overstory, into writing, as is evident from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Part of the plan, in accordance with Article 28 of the UDHR, is that there will be future documents which will make the rights embodied in the UDHR enforceable in the courts of all countries. An International Bill of Rights is the written embodiment of that overstory, and, as Yuval Noah Harari calls for in his book “Nexus”, it is a powerful “self correcting mechanism” capable of securing humanity’s social contract when our leaders falter, as all humans do at times.
That document, an International Bill of Rights, is on the table before you – have the imagination and courage to contribute to it! Each of us is needed to make this happen. Democracy is self governance. No one gets to govern because they were luckily born into a particular family or through some religious lineage. People are only allowed to govern when they are freely chosen by other people, and then they are required to follow the rules provided by those who are governed. As Rousseau said, “the people build the machine, the Prince merely operates it.”
Given the global challenges we face, climate change, rising authoritarianism, increasing wealth disparity, pandemics, and now war in the Ukraine, it’s time for people in all countries to plan together for enforceable law in all countries — to save ourselves, and the planet on which we live, Earth.
Narrow minds default to the impossible. Open minds realize there is a fine line between the impossible and the inevitable and try to cross it. As Eleanor Roosevelt, the “First Lady for the World” said: “We must do the thing we think we cannot do.”
Many may say that we cannot reach an international agreement to live together based on fundamental rights for all. They say “We will never agree.” At Unite for Rights, we live by the response Eleanor would give when she was working on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was dismissed by naysayers: “Let’s see”; “Let’s ask”; “Let’s Do!”
Planning ahead is a good way to help determine where you will end up. Leaving the Earth’s ecosystem, and our individual well-being to random chance, or the market, is not enough. We must plan. 
For, as Confucius said “He who doesn’t look at what is distant will find sorrow near at hand.” Planning ahead is the means by which we avert calamity, whether it is the climate crisis, or another World War.
Don’t be dismayed by the enormity of the task. The success of the plan only requires 1% of all people, nonprofits and businesses. Please be one of them! When the path to a plan is worn, others will follow.
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