Opioid Crisis is Nothing New

The human memory has tremendous blind spots. Time after time a person's recollection of past events with regard to the fine details has proven to be wholly unreliable. Although we remember 'chunks' of events our minds fill in the small details when recalling these past events and how this is done depends on what biases, experiences, and how aware and conscious we are that this is fact happens.

When we become fictional story tellers about past events we are not necessarily being dishonest but we are making stories up. Nassim Taleb refers to this as the narrative fallacy in his book The Black Swan. This is when in our minds we rewrite what has happened in a past event to make it 'fit' with our usually false perception of who and what we are. Many of us are guilty of this but some of us are more poorly calibrated than others. This means that the gap that exists between who we think we are and what we actually are is bigger than we care to acknowledge.

It was officially declared that the opioid crisis is a national epidemic. One can not scan the news on the internet or read a national paper without reading the words opioid crisis. The headlines are labeled incorrectly. They should read, "White communities are experiencing what Black communities have experienced for the past five decades." The media would seem to have people believe that the reasons that cause these situations in the white communities today and black communities in the past are different. They are not.

High unemployment is directly related to an increase in drug use and an increase in crime rates. Nothing too ground breaking in that revelation. I can not help but notice the kid gloves the media is using in their handling of this opioid crisis with respect to their portrayal of these communities as victims and sounding off a rallying cry for help. Whether or not one feels these folks are victims is not the topic of this article. What is pertinent is that these are the same media outlets that for decades would portray disenfranchised blacks as the cause of their own problems and issues fueling the conservative values of not providing help for situations that they believed people themselves create. I reckon things are different since people like the mayor of Tennessee lost her son to an overdose and places referred to as 'Middle America' in Ohio are now experiencing what cities like Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Compton, Camden and every other predominately black city with high unemployment has been experiencing for the last 50 years.

 There is a word for understanding someone else's pain and struggles, it is called empathy. The reason why there has been an explosion of drug use in communities that traditionally didn't struggle with it is the same reason why other poor communities have had to deal with it. The media does the general population a disservice when portraying events of the same root cause as different in origin. It will be interesting to see how changes to social services, criminal justice and legislation reflect the 'new' crisis impacting Americans now that the Americans being affected are more "American."



#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset