At the Table of Human Right - At the Table of

Six strangers argue about a road.

They meet in a diner after a county commission meeting that got out of hand, and they are still meeting eighteen weeks later.
A welder who inherited his convictions and has never examined them. A pharmacist who left a country where the government answered to God and no one answered to the government. A civics teacher who believes rights are what a people agree to. An engineer who grew up under a state that granted everything and withdrew what it liked. A county emergency manager who has actually had to decide who gets the truck.
And an old man who mostly asks questions.

In most of the world, across most of history, rights have come from whoever was in charge. What is granted can be revised, suspended, or taken back.
The United States said something else. It said rights were never granted at all.
If a man gives me my rights, that man can take them. If God gives me my rights, only God can take them.

Eighteen nights. Eighteen real cases you can look up—a pink house in Connecticut, a wall through Berlin, two schoolgirls who would not salute, a courtroom in Moscow where every man confessed to something that never happened.
Nobody at that table wins. Everybody finds out where his own road goes.

Written so a high school student can follow it and an honest adult cannot dodge it.