Something in this particular narrative of heroin overdose-related deaths in American small towns (and I believe there is a narrative pattern), disturbed me.
The story presents a black and white picture of an innocent (the catch word is "unsuspecting") small, "tightly-knit" community in, all white and all cute, invaded by the dark forces of evil, embodied by Mexican drug dealers, who easily cross borders and through an informal global supply chain, and sell poison to little children at prices below the market rate (cheap).
The borderlessness, the easy access to outsiders, the contact between evil marauders and innocent white cherubs, puts a dampener on globalization. A fundamental tenet of globalization is the opening up of borders, literally and metaphorically and even metaphysically. But, as stories like these, evidence, with goods and capital, bad things too will flow as a result of the world gradually but surely integrates.
When globalization benefits a community, then the credit goes to it and by default almost to the American faith in the beauty of the free-market economy. However, when globalization hurts a community, especially an American community, then the blame falls, not on the impersonal forces of globalization, but on the Mexico's, the China's and the Africa's. Many of the disease-producing agents are said to arrive because of more facile contact with Africa. The fish we consume, injects mercury into our blood stream because they come from China's highly polluted rivers.
When American lives are destabilized by globalization, then globalization remains not so impersonal, but acquires specific names, faces and identities, calculated to produce, it seems the kind of xenophobia that we saw in the reaction to the Superbowl Coca Cola ad.
The reaction to the Coca Cola ad did not take place in a vacuum, but in the context of a shrill, jingoism-laden discourse that is churning at this moment in this nation, the most ardent of the champions of globalization when it happens elsewhere.
Regarding the death due to heroine overdose in the small towns of America: Shouldn't we first check out the correlation between the cultures and opportunities in these locales and the deaths? A vast majority of the victims of heroin overdose are young and white. Instead of correlating the heroin with the lives of those who are compelled to consume them, a neat correlation is made between heroin and its Mexican suppliers.
Why?
In connection with the death of 21 year old Alysa Ivy in Hudson, Wisconsin, it's said:
In the wake of the prescription painkiller epidemic, heroin, much of it Mexican, has wormed its way into unsuspecting communities far from the Southwestern border as a cheaper and often more easily obtained alternative.
"Unsuspecting communities"? Were the unsuspecting and innocent of the world folks of these communities deceived into taking heroin when they thought they were consuming kale?
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