The Human Element

I've been meaning to type this for quite a while. The picture I'll be talking about has been in my memory for over a year. It was a news article about stephen harper and the picture showed him sitting with his wife watching their son playing a basketball game with his highschool. At the time I thought Harper the Younger was a nice-looking boy and that harper looked remarkably un-robotic. There seemed to be glimmers of real emotions (and not his usual selfish ones that are the only other ones I've seen bubble to the surface) as he watched his son playing.

Of course, I've never doubted that harper is a human being. I don't believe in the reality of concepts like "good" and "evil." My words used against harper (and many others) such as "vermin" and "sub-human" are just that, .... words. I have no belief that harper, or anyone else, is actually lower-than-human and therefore entitled to whatever murderous abuses I could dream up.

So this picture didn't so much come as a shock to me as it made me feel bad for the boy and a trifle surprised about the man. Yes, we're all human. And even stephen harper is capable of caring about someone else.

But that only makes certain of his actions all the more revolting. A while ago, I wrote about how robotic stephen harper is. I still believe that he's a psychopath. But evidently (as that picture seemed to show) he's not 100% selfish and narcissistic.

When he heard that the Afghan military, on who's behalf the CF is fighting, killing and dying for, are raping young children, harper could have stopped and thought about how this revolting behaviour invalidates the entire mission (at least because it is harder to suppress an insurgency against a government whose operatives rape children). But instead, he sees the issue as a problem to be swept under the rug.

When he heard that First Nations peoples at Attawapiskat were cramped into filthy, unheated shacks in the far north, he could have thought about those poor suffering people, and resolved to change the government policies that had condemned them to dangerous squalor. Instead, he deliberately lies and blames the victims for their plight and increases his level of abuse.

And on and on it goes and WILL go. All the people unemployed. All the sick people losing access to help. All the people about to lose the roof over their head. All the people exploited and abused by the corporations and the state. These are all examples of suffering that harper is CAPABLE of preventing, but he chooses instead to exacerbate. Because he's sold himself to capitalist greed-pigs. He's their errand boy.

Young Master Harper: I am sorry that I have to call your father an asshole and a scum-bag. But that's what he is. stephen harper: I am sorry that your son is going to hear so much out-pouring of abuse against his father from so many people and that he is going to have to live with having an imprisoned war criminal for an old man. But you brought it all upon yourself. You had a choice. You could have chosen differently, but you chose to serve power instead of humanity.

The loss is all of ours.