Saturday, December 20, 2014

Elizabeth May - unlike Stephen Harper - is NOT a 'Rogue Boomer'

It is interesting to speculate why Elizabeth May, so similar in age to Stephen Harper, is so different in her attitude.

While Elizabeth is only 4 years older than Harper, I think she benefited from having an activist mom who introduced her children to adult issues at least a dozen years before many others first seriously think about them.

(Ie as young adults, after their upbringing in their formative years have hardened into dogma --- and when it is thus too late !)

I think I was a relatively ordinary child until I was ten, when a sudden change of circumstance separated me from a neighbourhood of kids playing outside and left me with only adult aged books and adult aged news magazines for boon companions.

Almost instantly, kids even a fair bit older than me seemed immature and boring and I much preferred to hang about with educated adults.

Ten - and an intellectual snob !

But as a result, my recollections of the Fifties (coincidentally my years before I was ten) is almost 100% childlike sunshine - while the early Sixties (my true formative years) are cast in the darkest direst most adult-like Noir.

I suspect that Harper had a perfectly ordinary childhood and that he never even suspected he'd just played tag and keep away during some of the most exciting years of the century - until he was in university.

Then regret-filled nostalgia kicked in - and he's been trying to relive the glory days of Fifties Big Fin Cars, Scientism and Golly Gee Modernity ever since...

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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