But this sweet taste of home was accompanied by an intense bitterness at the sight, smell, and sound of the approaching 2010 Winter Olympics invading my hometown and the rest of the lower mainland. This bitterness lead to a fuming and almost adolescent fury - as a result I had great aspirations to detail to you the lunacy, the disastrous economic hazards, the environmental destruction, and the social hierarchies made prevalent by international tourism. I had articles, links, photos and other images, I was going to talk of the culture of individualism that comes with capitalism, the decline of democracy that follows profitable enterprises, and the blind hypocrisy of the Olympics in general. I was going to look at how tourism destroys small town industries and how citizens of an apparently egalitarian society would have to pay for the elite class to live in luxury condos built on the land previously inhabited by those of lower economic standing.
And then I thought: how would this written rant be different from any of my pub/party alcohol-driven conversations of the past year where I sputter helplessly as people nod sympathetically?
And I realized that as a citizen of another city, another province, I would not be able to look upon this any more deeply than through the eyes of a visitor. I am no longer a local, and so even though I see my once self-sufficient hometown reduced to a string of roadside box stores which service the traffic to Whistler while the downtown core suffers a dry death, I can only look at this situation as an outsider with a nostalgic tie to the past. I have not had any good experience writing in this passionately cynical and yet fully cliched sophisticated moronic manner.
But I do enjoy drawing in it!
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