Rights have not been handed down to us on a silver platter; our ancestors have fought for them. Rights bind us all together and they "are the very bedrock of community." Yet, our "rights are indivisible" above everything else. One must remember that since rights are in place to make us equal, "If they come for you, they also come for me. That means we must stick together". Thus rights "seek to protect human agency, the chief expression of human agency is difference. To believe in Rights is to believe in defending difference". It can be deducted that, rights protect us equally, but enable us to retain our own individual identity. ". rights express not only individual claims, but also collective values- .
Since rights protect our freedoms, Ignatieff discusses the freedoms, which are ideas of "Individual and Group Rights". He is elaborating on our individual and group rights and identifying where they come into practise. "What holds a nation together is the commitment we each make to treat individuals the same". The problem is "nobody wants to be treated like everybody else. We want this as a base line [we want to] be treated equally and to be recognised as different." The difficulty with this is that people want to be treated the same but different at the same time. This is very hard for a government and society to accomplish. Governments, to try to equalize all citizens, have tried forced assimilation, but it has always failed. "The Russian empire sought to Russify the Poles in the nineteenth century. The empire failed." The Canadian government tried forced assimilation with the aboriginal people, who " could become Canadian citizens only when they ceased to be Aboriginals." This failed. Groups want to be recognised as equals with the same basic rights as the majority, such as "health care" , but also want their "individual rights recognised." It is clear that we cannot go on arguing, threatening and fighting for rights.