I don’t care for gift-wrapped rights. I’d rather have the fight. Besides, they never give the good ones outright. Like the ability to mess up once or twice and come out of it without a spinning record playing scratchy music in some judge’s office forever somewhere. Or to take stock of what all the world has to offer, before substantiating it into federal categories of access and control. I’m supposed to believe in God we trust, when my entire life a nonlethal, nonpoisonous plant has been condemned to extinction by my own government. I don’t know what you’re saying with closed eyes and hands folded together, but I assure you, there is a more powerful form of prayer. To any entity that fancies itself creator. Speaking just from my experience, there would be hell to pay if I caught you tearing pages out of my journal. Literally. Literarily. And eternal.
And yet, that is what we are hypothetically doing to a creator every time we build systems that only speak legalese. Like the world is locked, laws are keys, and without a lawyer on hand, it’s just safer not to touch anything. But I have more faith in the status of existence. Compared to its own inventions, the human being is a better system. Creative, flexible, great at independent study, plays well with others. We are born with our rights. In fact, I would go so far as to write, anyone who ever even tries to put them down on a piece of paper seeks to own you, in some way, if not today, then slowly over time. You. Your children. The entirety of life. Like it was a book we could go through and edit, lines to cut, or whole pages in clumps torn out altogether.

But that is not the nature of the universe.
Our creator is not a writer. It’s a chemist.