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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