Wednesday, August 19, 2015

First Nations Activists Confront harper In Fredericton

I found this really powerful. When I was a kid I grew up believing that Canada was a good place. We had "Indians" just like in the USA, but whereas the US-Americans fought brutal wars with their "Indians" as they colonized their west, Canadians seemed to have been able to move in peacefully with treaties. Sure, "Indians" were poor and (as I got older I realized that they suffered some social problems, such as alcoholism, which I was told was due to a genetic predisposition), and that this was "tragic" but with hard work, in God's good time, they too would come to take their places in our successful Canadian family.

Obviously I haven't thought that way for quite some time. But I was still struck, when seeing this video, with the visceral feeling that Canada is a landmass named and conquered by Europeans, and that the First Nations are a separate people, ... the people who settled here millennia before us, ... a separate people with a separate constitutional status. (And their "status" is only relevant in relation to us. They exist on their own, quite independently of our courts and our treaties with them.)

They are there protesting the detestable stephen harper as he makes a campaign stop in Fredericton.
These First Nations activists are trying to confront harper because he is the supreme thief and bully. For well over a century, there has been a policy of assimilation and extermination and theft. It was reversed slightly in the mid-20th Century, but it was always there. But with harper, there is brazen violation of treaty rights. Serial insults to the First Nations as a sovereign people. harper represents the undercurrent of racist sludge emitted by far too many settler Canadians. And it is intolerable to them.

Just look at that cavalcade of limousines though! Look at this puffed-up bully and his motorcade. I daresay that cowardly stephen harper loves himself these trappings of power! And it's a well known fact that in this campaign, harper is insulating himself from the public like never before. he's wrapped in scandals, his policies have been failures, and more and more of the population utterly loathes him. And I call him a coward because he is a coward. he has always run from uncomfortable situations (like facing the truth). And (because it needs repeating) this harper character, who likes to masquerade as a great warrior leader, shamefully abandoned his party followers when shots were heard in the corridors of Parliament Hill. Without a word to anyone, Mr. Strong Leadership scurried like a cockroach into a nearby closet, where he cowered until, well, who knows? Did he come out on his own? Or did his followers open the closet door and see him in the fetal position in the closet's back corner?

Now, consider these First Nations women trying to confront harper. It's just them versus all those security men in the suits and the cops. And they know how they've been treated by such men in the past. It takes real courage to face down such power in order to make a stand. harper has none of that stuff.

Ultimately, the thuggish mediocrity, low functioning scuzzball never even sees those women. Only true and blue party supporters are allowed to attend his events. This is the sort of imbecile who will still vote for such a clearly rotten man and rotten party:

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