Why Does Stephen Harper Want to Turn Us Into Bloody Amerika?

I try not to watch too much American TV news, because what's happening in this diseased Harperland is crazy enough.

And because every time I do watch it these days, it seems another black man is being killed by a white police officer for no sane reason.

And when I see someone handcuff a human being after shooting him six times in the back, as the South Carolina police officer Michael Slager did to Walter Scott, makes me almost physically ill... 



Because as I've said before, my heroes are healers not killers.

And this too could only happen in cruel, crazy, blood soaked Amerika. 

Robert Bates was a volunteer deputy who'd never led an arrest for the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office. So how did the 73-year-old insurance company CEO end up joining a sting operation this month that ended when he pulled out his handgun and killed suspect Eric Harris instead of stunning him with a Taser?

A lawyer representing the Harris family says the answer is simple. Bates paid big money to play a cop in his spare time, attorney Daniel Smolen says, but he didn't have the training to handle the job.

Where rich people like Robert Bates get to pay to play cops, by buying thousands of dollars worth of equipment and vehicles for the police department. And chairing the Sherriff's re-election campaign, as Bates did in 2012.

So he could have the pleasure, at the age of 73, of hunting other humans...



And only in Amerika could a police officer tell the dying Eric Harris, as he struggled to breathe, to "fuck his breath." So sick is that country.

But of course every case is different, it isn't just madness, and there are some very simple reasons this is happening.

Starting with, as Scott Gilmore explains, the simplest one of all: there are just too many guns

There are more guns per capita in the United States than in any other country in the world. Estimates vary from 270 million to 310 million legal and illegal guns in circulation. This provides almost one gun for every man, woman and child.

Which changes the way police approach their jobs.

With so many civilians carrying guns, is it surprising that the police shoot first and ask questions later? In fact, American police are at relatively more peril than their counterparts elsewhere.This has, understandably, created a police culture that is both defensive and aggressive.

And Gilmore is also right when he points out there is too much racism, which poisons everything. And too much hero worship, and glorification of violence. 

The third uniquely American factor is the embattled-hero mythology that surrounds the police. In no country are the cops as lionized as they are in the United States. Not even Canadians, who place the “Mounties” at the centre of their national identity, elevate the police to such heights. 

From The Lone Ranger to Hill Street Blues and CSI: Miami, American culture has constructed a pervasive narrative of the imperilled but noble police officer, courageously risking his life every day on the thin blue line between civilization and murderous chaos.

But what Gilmore and others in the MSM always fail to point out, is that thanks to Stephen Harper that American exceptionalism isn't so exceptional. And their nightmare is rapidly becoming OUR nightmare.

Because no Canadian Prime Minister has ever encouraged the cult of gun worship as much as he has..



For crass political reasons.

By scrapping the gun registry he deprived police officers of a tool that allowed them to know whether the home they were called to had any weapons, which has made them more jumpy and ready to use their own.

His Great War on Crime also portrays the control of criminal behaviour as an apocalyptic battle between civilization and chaos. Even though the crime rate has never been lower. While ignoring the far more mundane root causes, and our own racism.

And from the moment he came to power he has degraded our proud peacekeeping tradition, and tried to militarize our history, and make us a more war-like nation.

So sooner or later the bloody demons that are now loose in America will become OUR bloody nightmare...



You know, we really should have learned our lesson thirty-six years ago when so many women were murdered on a snowy day in Montreal at the École Polytechnique, by an angry misogynist with a gun...



But we didn't. We allowed Harper and his criminal Con regime to bury their precious legacy.

And in the process of killing so much that was good and beautiful in this country, kill my dreams of a less violent Canada.

So now all I can hope for is that in the next election Canadians can choose a Prime Minister who respects our values and our traditions.

So we can take back our peaceful country...



And bury this American monster...



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