The conservatives are so "Base"

Harper's Hollowed out House of Horrors : church on Sunday, dissing drowned refugees on Monday.

Recent polls on taking in refugees, in places like Canada, have confirmed what many of us non-church going Christians have always suspected.

Many of the most regular Christian church goers are among the biggest of all religious hypocrites ---- and I recall enough of my bible studying to note the special fate Jesus held for religious hypocrites.

Conservative parties - world wide and not just in Canada - are always revealed in political values surveys as having the greatest proportions of regular church attending activists and voters of any of the political parties.

Church ------ you know with all its Sunday talk of "doing something for Jesus every time you do something for the least of these".

But it turns out, Sunday's sermon didn't really take among many of the Conservative religious.

Because there they are on Monday eager to tell pollsters that they're against letting in any three year old terrorists, and frankly, the terrorists would all be better off if they drowned on some distant Turkish beach.

After all, they protest, how many three year olds drowned in swimming pools in Canada this summer with no one paying attention --- so why fuss over one more dead kid ?

Particularly a foreigner kid , a terrorist foreigner kid, a kid who is going to get better medical and social care - for free ! - than any of us hardworking conservative Canadians.

"Base" is the word to best describe hypocrites ...

So when top Conservative operators such as Canadian Jenni Byrne keep referring to their favourite conservative voters as being "base", just for once, let us all not disagree with them.

Base, indeed, is the word that best describes such hypocrisy.

Now let us pivot back seventy five years, to the year 1940, when the small and the helpless - this time nations as well as individuals - were being invaded the cruelest invaders ever.

While the rest of the world (much more church going then than now) again sat on their prayer books.... and did nothing.

It was perhaps to them, people like all the religious hypocrites that the much-churched Henry Dawson had grown up with in small town Truro Nova Scotia, that Dr Dawson directed his "small" penicillin Manhattan Project.

Back in the same formative years for young Henry when Canadian satirist Stephen Leacock wrote his famous "Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich", a book that neatly skewered Canada's very wealthy and very religious for their "base" hypocrisy....

#HumanityWashesAshore ---- a threatening flood or a saving fountain ?

Aylan Kurdi : potentially harmful or potentially helpful ?

One can view this week's refugee crisis (just as one can view WWII and WWII Penicillin) as a conflict over varying ways to best control our fears of the future.

Because all humanity, all the time (sometimes consciously but often also unconsciously) worries about the unknown future.

It remains the sole most distinctive thing that we humans do that other lifeforms don't seem to do.

Controlling fears of Future by controlling everything... or nothing

Many of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by controlling everything ---- after totally eliminating everything else that we judge potentially harmful. What remains is a knowable future we can control and direct.

Control freaks.

(Think Adolf Hitler, Howard Florey and their ilk.)

But others of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by not controlling anything  ---- diversifying our biological portfolio to totally retain everything potentially helpful, giving humanity lots of Plan Bs, Cs,Ds, etc.

Portfolio diversifiers.

(Think Henry Dawson and his supporters.)

To many of a Vancouver newspaper's letter writers, a little three year old refugee boy seems a potential terrorist, best drowned at birth - overseas if possible.

If this was 1940, perhaps by drowning on a badly overcrowded boat, filled with Europe's Jews, on its way to exile in Madagascar.

If not drowned, then perhaps gassed and burned, just in case any little baby grows up as a Jewish terrorist.

But this is 2015, and their new phobia is Arabs not Jews, so a Turkish beach will have to do instead until new furnaces can be stoked up.

To other newspaper letter writers the little three year old boy was potentially a genius and savior who would grow up to solve our environmental crisis (or perhaps not), but in any case a child to be held and cherished, a fellow human being.

Potential terrorist or potential savior - or just little three year old -- now we will never know...

Aug '43 photo of 3 year old changes the whole world

Her name was Patty Malone, not Aylan Kurdi, but ultimately she also died way too young at age three.

But four months before her quiet death off stage, a single photograph of Patty in her hospital hugging her stuffie captured the hearts of most mothers (and some fathers) all around a war-weary world and literally changed the course of history.


Before Patty and the photograph, wartime penicillin was succeeding as a weapon crafted solely for war - a secret medicine, produced in strictly limited quantities - to be unleashed only when the Allies invaded Europe.

All to get the Allied lightly wounded back into the killing fields before the Axis wounded could, to provide a little manpower advantage to the Allies.

The dying civilians and soldiers of the world were not to get a look see until the war's end.

Canadian-born Dr Henry Dawson opposed that idea from the beginning.

With penicillin his tiny team had made themselves, he acted out his belief that, in a war that was as much moral as material, the Allies had to better the Nazis in the treatment of the weakest members of society at war, not match the Nazis morally on their slide down to Hell.

His ideas were shut out, censored in wartime's published media but even totalitarian regimes could not stop gossip - if fact war censorship makes it flourish all the more.

Dr Dawson was working in Manhattan and soon the entire tight-knit NYC metro area medical gossip mill was rife with talk of Dawson's miraculous success with penicillin in saving the un-saveable.

It quickly spread from doctor and nurse to patient and family - quickly reaching Dr Dante Colitti, an Italian Catholic New Yorker in a hospital only a mile away from Dawson's.

Dante had been viewed as almost un-saveable as a child himself and no New York hospital would hire after his graduation ---- until war staff shortages made it necessary.

So he had no love - to put it mildly ! - for the American medical elite's wartime dictates demanding public silence about penicillin's miracle cures.

He decided to phone America's biggest daily and Heart's flagship, The New York American Journal, begging them to get Washington to release penicillin for one of his hospital's tiny patients dying from a disease penicillin could cure.

Interestingly (and paralleling Dawson's decision to help save SBE patients) Colitti had no business what so ever involving himself with this type of patient - he was a surgeon (and a mere resident) and this was a matter for other types of doctors all together.

His was simply a heartfelt concern for a fellow being, made by a guy about to get married and start having three olds himself.

Think of Dawson and Colitti as being the exact opposite to Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who would shove his own children under the campaign bus, if he calculated it would help him to win re-election.

The Hearst organization really knew how to run an all out newspaper crusade and with days of the photo of Patti in that hospital bed hitting newspaper readers in America, the governments of the whole world knew about the miracle of penicillin and wanted lots of it, yesterday.

Despite wartime censorship, Neutral countries' diplomats in Washington even quickly got the news out to all the Axis countries
as well.

As Dawson had always wanted, wartime penicillin suddenly was produced in mass quantities during the war, to help all the dying soldiers and civilians of Allied nations, the Neutral nations, the Liberated lands and finally the Axis countries as well.

Penicillin remains the best known, best loved medicine in the world.

All because of one photograph of one little three year old.

I hope and pray Aylan Kurdi does the same today for the refugee crisis .....

We're trending #1 ! Canada's refugee drowning policy condemned in social (and mainstream) media all over the world

Remember when Canada only used to be on everyone's lips when it did something good ?

Aylan Kurdi : former Allies shamed by former Axis

A former Axis nation, the very crowded Germany still managed to take in almost 80,000 refugees last year.

By contrast, Canada, a former Allied nation, is both big and empty - 35 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles.

In 1956, with less than half as many people (only 16 million people) it still took in almost 40,000 Hungarian refugees.

In 2015, that would mean it would need to take in 80,000 Syrian refugees to match its 1956 effort.

So far, in total, over this entire multi-year refugee crisis, Canada has taken in just 1,000.

Admittedly, the Syrians are not white Anglo Saxon Protestants, so they're hardly Canadian PM Stephen Harper's personal choice as new Canadian neighbours.

But I doubt that an earlier Canadian (also a white Anglo Saxon Protestant), Martin Henry Dawson, would have just sat back and watched little kids drown trying to come into Canada.....

What would Dawson do ? As babies drown because of an uncaring Harper government

#HarperDrownedThisBaby

In the Fall of 1940, pushed beyond the breaking point by years of observing a world unwilling to reach out to help a endless parade of small nations and small people brutalized by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo, Martin Henry Dawson broke all medical protocol and broke free of a lifetime of caution and deference to higher authorities.

So, on October 16th 1940 in NYC, Dawson injected his primitive penicillium juice into two dying patients, thus (incidentally) ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics  ----and all the hope it has given this world ever since.

As I look at the picture of this poor needlessly drowned child, who an uncaring Harper government won't let into Canada, I can't help what wonder "What would Dawson do ?" if he were around today....