Shocked In Death, Shocked In Life: More Than A Taser Story

Like so many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking for work in one of those “normal” countries that Poland was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles have joined this mass exodus during the last three years alone. Dziekanski’s cohorts have gone to work as bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to British Columbia, Canada, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom. “After seven years of waiting, [Dziekanski] arrived to his utopia, Vancouver,” said the Polish consul general, Maciej Krych. “Ten hours later, he was dead.” Much of the outrage sparked by the video, which was made by another passenger at the airport, has focused on the controversial use of Tasers, already implicated in 17 deaths in Canada and many more in the United States. But what happened in Vancouver was about more than a weapon. It was also about an increasingly brutal side of the global economy — about the reality that many victims of various forms of economic “shock therapy” face at our borders. Rapid economic transformations like Poland’s have created enormous wealth — in new investment opportunities; currency trading; in leaner, meaner companies able to comb the globe for the cheapest location to manufacture. But from Mexico to China to Poland, they also have created tens of millions of discarded people, the people who lose their jobs when factories close or lose their land when export zones open. Understandably, many of these people often choose to move: from countryside to city, from country to country. As Dziekanski appeared to be doing, they go in search of that elusive “normal.” But there isn’t enough normal to go around, or so we are told. And so, as migrants move, they are often met with other shocks. A treacherous razor fence protecting Spain’s North Africa enclaves, or a Taser gun on the U.S.-Mexican border. Canada, which used to be known around the world for its openness to refugees, is militarizing its borders, with lines between immigrant and terrorist blurring fast. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/21/5374/

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