The Audacity of the Pampered

How fortunate, to live in a free society where one can express any opinion that seems to coincide with a personal sense of righteousness. And express it freely, wherever, whenever one chooses. It's the kind of opportunity that simply cannot be passed by for it's a human right. That there are meaningful occasions and that there are certain ceremonial places where dignity and respect for those with alternate views mitigate against spewing bile, is just irrelevant.

Particularly when the speaker is young and educated and middle-class and privileged, because she has a bold and intemperate personality that she errs in thinking she is wholly entitled to breach protocol and state her unsolicited opinion. That as a Senate page she has forsworn impulsive and immature behaviour, given her word that she will offer respect and consideration to all those who express an alternate politic than hers, is seen to her to be irrelevant.

She has taken it upon herself in her inflated self-image of herself, to speak out by displaying an insulting sign that speaks volumes about her ideology and her utter lack of decorum and respect in a chamber demanding both, reflective of a civil society. Brigette DePape, after having served just short of a year as a Senate page, a privileged position for anyone aspiring to politics, and in the process banking a nice salary, has expressed her contempt for her country.

Canada, according to this young woman of firmly immovable beliefs, is little better than a dictatorship and all those who were gathered to hear the reading of the Speech from the Throne on the occasion of the formal investiture of the 41st Parliament under a majority Conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, were held by her in gross contempt.

It was only she, a 21-year-old university student-cum-Senate-page who had the courage to disrupt the proceedings by holding up her hand-made 'Stop' sign, with its message that the Prime Minister should be put to a full stop. "This country needs a Canadian version of an Arab Spring", is what she wrote in a little explanatory manifesto. "I think that youth need to engage in creative acts of civil disobedience."

She was motivated to become a page for a very good reason: "I was interested in politics, I wanted to learn more about politics." Her resume that accompanied her application revealed a $75,000 scholarship to study international development and globalization. In her subjective conclusion she could just as well have studied outside academia with G-8-and-Global-Finance-bashing anarchists.

Protesting is our fundamental right as Canadians, if we feel we have something to protest. Insulting Parliament by degrading its procedures and by scorning the office of the Prime Minister and the man who currently holds that title betrays a mind arrested in adolescent immaturity.