Go Burnsville #Blaze420!!

I spent most of my childhood growing up in Burnsville, a suburb south of the Twin Cities. I can confidently say that I learned about most of the common recreational drug terminology and lingo in my day-to-day exposure within a city that is probably notorious, at least to people familiar with the area, for its reputation as a more "ghetto" community. (I am totally against using this term in such way FYI.)

I lived a very sheltered life at home and surprisingly through most of elementary and middle school. And what made me inclined to look more into the way my exposure to others' drug use in this community in the first place was recalling a very vivid memory of my friends and I, who were also very sheltered, taking our mechanical pencils and simulating the act of injecting a syringe into our veins by holding down the eraser mechanism. Why did we do this? Looking back now, I can kind of determine why I might have felt inclined to do this silly little act. As I said before, I was incredibly sheltered. Was it because I was raised being held to very high expectations? Probably. Was it my choice to be sheltered? Probably. I think because of this, I held a reputation of being one of the most "innocent" people at school, which in itself I believe held a somewhat negative connotation because I didn't "fit in." I think maybe a little part of me wanted some sort of gratification from others to prove to myself that I could fit in just by partaking in these trivial, little actions. I think I had to ask someone what this act even was supposed to mean. But even more dumb things like this rippled throughout my school too. Many of us KIDS were crushing up smarties to "snort" the dust or smoking Twix candy bars.

So, here's my messy analysis. Noticeably now, many of these kids who were simulating these acts came from the wealthier middle-class families of Burnsville. So what I think the trend was to take stigmatized stereotypes about the poorer neighborhoods that overtly had a larger presence of crime and drug use and turn those stereotypes into "cool kid" behavior. Either to achieve a sense of association to a minority community or to create a novelty representation of Burnsville pride. Soon enough, the latter took off completely in high school. By that time, I had transferred to the blatantly more snobby neighboring city of Lakeville which I think allowed me to gain an interesting insider/outsider perspective of my childhood city. As I was still connected with many people from Burnsville on social media, I saw that Burnsville students constantly championed the "Burnsville Blaze" on social media during sporting events in high association to smoking. 4/20 became Burnsville's beloved "holiday." Of course, this caught the attention of the high school administration, so there was even talk about changing the name of our athletic program so that it no longer was "Blaze." This proved counterproductive, as it increased the popularity of "Blaze" and its association to smoking and other harmful behavior (because apparently students were then older and able to better access substances).

As it stands today, I know of several people that I would've graduated with at Burnsville who did not graduate high school, did not pursue anything after high school, got pregnant, or just seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth completely. From a distance and with my close connections to my best friends there, I heard countless stories about how common it was for people to carelessly smoke cigarettes and joints around campus, getting DUI's, getting involved with drug trade as means of making profits, having house parties busted and people getting arrested for drug possession, and even people shooting up in public spaces. And growing up with actions that were meant to resemble many of these real-deal situations, I can say that I was never surprised to hear these stories even though I was absolutely horrified by them becoming so normalized. It's such an interesting thing to trace back to when we were just little, incredibly impressionable kids and having regular exposure to related behaviors and influences in the community—how this type of normalized exposure can impose or encourage addictive habits.