D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     July 2005

Thinking Locally, Acting Globally

Taking care of your neighbors in the global village.

The other day, as we were delivering last month's issue of Desert Exposure, the manager of a chain store—which will remain nameless here, since he was very nice and apologetic—came up and told me his shop couldn't distribute our copies any longer. He'd tried to hide them whenever his district manager came for inspection, but the corporate dictates were strict. He'd even relocated our copies to a nearby coffee shop, but now that place was out of business. So he had no choice but to turn me and my two bundles of Desert Exposure's away.

"They won't let us have anything local," he explained, a phrase I subsequently couldn't get out of my head. Even as I thanked him, told him not to worry about it, and calculated that I could relocate his two bundles at a new place opening up the street, that corporate prohibition against anything "local" nagged at me like a mosquito bite. Try as I might, I couldn't help scratching at it.

Much like the adage that says, "All politics is local," the truth is that even in this wired, instantaneous-communication, corporate-homogenized "global village," everything at its core is still "local." When we've checked our email and signed for that FedEx package and called mom in South Dakota on the cell phone, at the end of the day our lives still must be enacted on a little plot of ground. "Road warriors" may jet across the globe, flogging the latest must-have frammistat to be churned out of some conglomerate registered in Delaware but manufacturing in Mumbai, but when they slid e between the sheets at trip's end, home is still "local."

I suppose there are people so globally savvy and footloose that they feel no sense of place at all. The mention of "home" conjures no warm, welcoming visions in their heads—only, perhaps, a favorite suite at the Hilton in Singapore. For most of us, however, home is still, as Robert Frost once put it, "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

"Local," if you will, is where the heart is.

So what does it mean when America's conglomerates no longer make a place for "anything local"? At some level—the atomic-particle level of the financial universe, perhaps—the money that makes their machines run remains "local"—doesn't it? When Acme Gizmo Corp. cranks out its latest made-in-Bangladesh doohickey, flogs it mercilessly on TV in-between segments of "The Apprentice," and convinces Mr. and Mrs. America that they can't live without it, even when they buy on Amazon.com and take delivery via FedEx, the gizmo still ultimately collects dust in Mr. and Mrs. America's home in Someplace, USA.

True, the monetary transaction may be utterly virtual—no actual, physical greenbacks changing hands, only bytes moving from the buyer's bank account to add a few zeroes to the bazillions belonging to Acme Gizmo and its faceless venture-capitalist owners. It's not as if an actual fistful of coins gets tossed atop a mountain of gold in which these corporate titans wallow, Scrooge McDuck-style.

But at some level, don't they need us, the actual, physical customers? And aren't we, in some irreducible way, local?

I confess to doing more than my share to prop up the global economy with online shopping, and the drivers for the various delivery services all know the route to our place by heart. We've even been known to shop at Wal-Mart when there's absolutely no other choice. (Though you'll notice that Desert Exposure is not distributed at your "local" Wal-Mart—our choice, not theirs.) Living in a smallish spot on the map like Silver City, with wants and needs nurtured over years of big-city living and fanned daily by the global media machine, it's hard to do otherwise. Even as I'm typing this, the doorbell rings with something fetched overnight from halfway across the continent by the miracle of FedEx.

We try to shop locally first, of course, and in particular to patronize the advertisers who make this publication possible. But even that determination can be dicey: If I buy an Orange Cream Slush (my latest addiction—blame our daughter) at Sonic, am I boosting the local economy via our franchisee or merely feeding the maw of whatever corporate monster owns Sonic? I could buy some other frozen treat at a locally owned, non-franchised place, but it wouldn't be an Orange Cream Slush, now would it? And if I boycott Sonic, am I unfairly punishing the nice young people who bring my Orange Cream Slush to my car window there?

Even if I decide to boycott all incarnations of that place whose corporate masters "won't let us have anything local," I'd also be hurting the perfectly nice local manager and his local employees. Or would I? Even the local operation would hardly miss my business; they aren't going to shut down because I suddenly stop patronizing the place in a fit of moral pique. The same goes for Sonic, should I somehow wean myself from my Orange Cream Slush dependency. The manager won't call his carhops together to announce grimly, "I'm afraid we're going to have to let three of you go. Fryxell has stopped buying Orange Cream Slushes and, well, you know how much business that brought in."

That's what would happen, though, if my boycott actually proved effective. The board of directors at Sonic world headquarters would not decide to make up for the lost revenue out of their Southwest Division by slashing their own bonuses. No one would yank the espresso machine out of the CEO's office in a cost-cutting move. At best, if my boycott truly reached the heart of the beast, they might fire a secretary or lay off someone in the mailroom. Then everybody else in the mailroom would have to work harder, all because I got on my high horse.


This is looking more and more like another one of those essays that doesn't offer any neat solution, and I'm sorry about that. This is the way the world works. You can talk all you want about the "butterfly effect," in which the random flapping of a butterfly's wings in South America ultimately causes, say, Donald Trump's hair to collapse. But corporate America is like the mythical Hydra—cut off one head and two more pop up to take its place. It eats butterflies for breakfast.

You can, of course, make an impact in the other direction. Local merchants really do feel your business. Even tiny increments of business add up. If you buy your lettuce at the co-op or the farmers' market rather than from Wal-Mart, your dollars will make a difference. If I can adopt a serious gelato jones and kick the Cream Slush habit, the local gelato place downtown will benefit.

Just don't think that you're also thereby punishing Wal-Mart for its dubious labor practices or preventing Sonic from getting Nepalese herders hooked on Cream Slushes. Whatever may be said for personally sticking to the high road and living the world as you would wish it to be, don't kid yourself that wishing will make it so. You can stop using Microsoft products tomorrow (I say as I type this in Microsoft Word) and rely exclusively on shareware running on Linux, but that won't put Bill Gates out on the street. Not even if all your neighbors do likewise.

The admonition to "think globally, act locally," holds to the extent that your world-wise actions can be most effective down the street, around the corner, across town. But unfortunately that's also the policy corporate moguls relentlessly follow as they scheme to squeeze every penny or pfennig out of every corner of our global village: Corporations look at the big picture, then enact those global dictates at the local level. If their actions hurt Silver City or Las Cruces or Deming or you or me, well, at least the stockholders are happy (who may, to be fair, also live here and be you or me).

I'm not exactly sure what the reverse—"think locally, act globally"—would mean, to be honest. Maybe it means to consider how your choices and actions affect the place where you live, then do what you can to push the world in that direction. To love your neighbor as yourself, and to realize that home is indeed where the heart must be.

We don't live virtually, at least not yet. We live grounded in a place that each of us makes better or worse, every day.

"They won't let us have anything local," indeed. Everything is local. Even the CEO of Wal-Mart lives somewhere. I wonder: Is he a good neighbor?

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure. If you spot him at Sonic, on his way to Wal-Mart, please keep it to yourself.


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