I can only approach this theme from my experience as a Christian. When I was a teenage Jesus Freak we were told that we were in the world but not of the world. This has long resonated with me. Being a biblical fundamentalist as well as a zealous young Christian (not exactly a zealot, though, even at the tender age of fifteen I was actually remarkably sane even for a fifteen year old male) I really took this command to the letter. I quit watching TV which I think was the final axe that separated me from my brother. Our only time together, every day after school, was spent lounging in the rec room watching reruns of Batman, Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched and the Flintstones. Even in my first few months as a new convert I continued to indulge in this fraternal practice and I think that we both, my brother and I, knew that this was the single shared activity that still held our fragile relationship together.
Then it came. I was early in grade ten and I think it was not quite October 1971. We were both seated in the rec room, TV on. I think we were watching Hogan's Heroes. I suddenly got up and announced as I left "You can sit here and get brainwashed if you want. I'm not doing this anymore." I began evangelizing the local mall after school instead or sometimes I would hitch-hike downtown and hang out with other Jesus freaks.
I wanted as little to do with the "values" I had been nurtured on as possible. I could not imagine going to university. I thought it was a waste of time, despite my own academic potential. I wanted to grow close to God, serve him through serving others and keep myself unspotted by a world that I considered to be corrupt, evil and headed straight for hell.
My how we change as we mature! I long ago became reconciled with the idea of higher education as being not only acceptable to God but inescapably necessary for arming people with knowledge and information against the rampant materialism and consumerism and vicious capitalism that have come to pervade our culture. While surviving the ruins of my family following my parents' divorce I came to realize that knowledge and learning would be essential to my coming to understand and overcome the world I was living in. Higher education was closed to me however. Having some huge issues about physical education (no problems about exercise but I never could adapt to the highly competitive jock culture that was being foisted on us as students by well meaning but ignorant gym teachers) so I eventually opted out and this compromised my ability to graduate from high school. I finished grade twelve one credit short which would bar me from post secondary school until my twenty-second birthday.
I could not stay with either of my parents, they were divorced, Mom was surviving the aftermath of a failed relationship and my father wanted nothing to do with me. At eighteen I got my own place, found unsuitable low paying employment and simply muddled my way forward as well as I could. Through some very influential and highly educated people in my life (some became mentors for a while) I became a voracious reader of literary classics, especially the works of Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. I survived a couple of semesters in college as a young mature student but lack of funds and other resources and supports made it necessary to discontinue my studies and continue working but in an honorable if poorly paid profession as a home support worker. I continued to read, and where I was able, to study but it became too difficult to maintain enough energy to attend evening classes in English literature and psychology after a day spent wiping other people's bums, emotionally supporting spouses approaching widowhood from their husband's deathbeds and cleaning up unspeakable domestic and bodily messes (none of this is exaggeration by the way). Did I also say that I was just twenty-six or twenty-seven or so?
One of my particular pivotal moments occurred when I was twenty-three. I was working in a parking lot and given the long periods of doing nothing but sitting on my south end I listened a lot to the radio, in this case to the CBC Ideas program. There were two program series that particularly marked me for life: "Freebooter Treatises" and "The Terror of Consumerism." At this time I was attending a Mennonite house church of intellectuals, radicals and artists seeking a Christian experience integrated with concepts of feminism, egalitarianism, anarchism, social and political activism, and simplicity of life. This was when I made my bench mark decision. Realizing that I had already made this choice, or rather that God had made this choice for me and I was now officially accepting it, I vowed that I would do everything possible to not allow consumerism or materialism or pop culture (sic) to touch, taint or influence my life. I eschewed pop culture, read the New Yorker, listened only to classical music, and read literary classics and anything that was spiritually, socially and politically inspiring and informative. I saw only cheap foreign and indie films that challenged or helped further inform my values, usually in repertory cinemas. Instead of getting a driver's license I walked everywhere or took public transit. I continued to work in low wage employment as a caregiver and support worker. I became adept in silent and contemplative prayer and did what I could to work and fight for social justice and minister to the outcasts of society. Eventually I became an artist, poet, and writer. I have sold some art but have gone largely unrecognized as an artist, writer or thinker, primarily as part of my pact with God to live humbly, silently and obscurely but to walk in a way that brings forth his light.
Living this way has completely destroyed my ability or inclination to be competitive in anything and to succeed in a viciously capitalist consumerist society you have to be competitive and not simply competitive but ruthless. You have to already be, or consent to turning into an amoral psychopath who cares nothing about whom he steps on or destroys in order to get ahead. This kind of thinking completely pervades our pop culture, our politics, the work world, our social values, everything. Capitalism has permeated everything, just like a chunk of uncovered Limburger cheese will make everything in your fridge smell like Limburger cheese.
I know it has also affected me, but I continue to resist it, even at the cost of my mental health which suffered tremendously from, among other things, the pressure of living apart from such a vile and repulsive societal environment. But I have recovered, I have found new strength and I will continue to walk, I will continue to pray, I will continue to talk and I will continue to resist, question, challenge and conquer this cancer of materialism, consumerism and unrestrained social Darwinism that is destroying our souls until either I am pushing up daisies or we have overcome, or both.
I don't really know what's become of my brother, in the meantime. We haven't seen or heard of each other in more than fifteen years. He would be in his early sixties. I believe that he did very well professionally. But at a very high cost. In the meantime I celebrate the abundance with which I am blessed in every moment of each new day.
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