In this video (imaginary) I am twenty years old. I have just survived a tumultuous year and have recently been kicked out of a house full of difficult young male Christian fundamentalists I don't call them fundamentalist Christians, but Christian fundamentalists. These were not Christians. They were profoundly fundamentalist. They just happened to describe their fundamentalism as being Christian. They could take on Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist characteristics but they would still be basically fundamentalists. Their real religion is fundamentalism. Christian is an afterthought. I have also known fundamentalist Christians. Despite their tendency to take the Bible a bit too literally they are, if I may use the word, fundamentally Christian and generally very kind and loving people despite their ignorance on biblical hermeneutics. I was at that time, I suppose, a fundamentalist Christian living among Christian fundamentalists. And I was just embarking on my long and perilous journey out of a Christianity that was fundamentalist to something broader, richer and deeper, which I still cannot define because it is still developing and evolving.
I left this house in disgrace. They didn't like me. Of course not. I was a Christian and they were fundamentalists. We really had nothing in common apart from a presumably shared belief system. They wanted me to work fulltime because they couldn't imagine any young male Christian fundamentalist not working fulltime for a living. I could only find part-time employment as much as I tried for fulltime.. It couldn't occur to them that it wasn't my fault, for the simple reason that, like all fundamentalists they were not able to think either critically nor compassionately.
It was early December and fortunately I could couch surf at my mother's for a while. During the two weeks or so that I stayed with her I really began to think and wonder about what to do with the rest of my life.
I could not imagine turning out the way I have now, forty years later. Neither could I have envisioned the many changes in our world and in our society that we now take for granted. Had I time travelled from downtown Vancouver then, towards the end of 1976 to this month of June, 2016 what would be the first thing to notice? I think I would find the streets decidedly different. Opting to begin walking west from Main and Hastings I would notice a degree of squalor unheard of even in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The Carnegie Centre before was still seven years from being reopened as a community centre and the living room/kitchen/dining room for many local residents. I would have been shocked at the open drug market and the open drug use. I would have stumbled by the Insite injection site absolutely puzzled and dismayed about harm reduction. I would have felt equally puzzled about the pot shops and the nice new restaurants and boutiques opening as well in the area, sort of like a Creeping Gastown dynamic. I would also have been completely appalled over the visible street homelessness, I think the contrasts would have been too much to take in.
I would detour towards Yaletown, unable to comprehend why our city suddenly looked like Hong Kong with all the condo towers rising where there used to be an industrial wasteland, I would notice a lot more Asian and other ethnicities represented and fewer white people and a plethora of new restaurants, bars and cafes. I would notice these coffee shops called Starbucks and wonder why there were so many and why everyone was carrying a paper cup full of coffee with them and I would be absolutely gobsmacked by all the different lattes etc.
Everything would appear more crowded, busier, noiser, with almost everyone absorbed in their little tech plastic rectangles. I would later learn that they are telephones that also doubled as personal computers with internet. I would ask what the hell is the internet? The confusion and the bewilderment would be absolute. I would feel very strange and very out of place.
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