When a Student Asks: Am I Going to Die?
I sat with our brave colleagues and cried with them. Karen Christian is a math teacher, but after school she’s president of United Teachers of Flint. That’s how it is with most of our union activists; they volunteer to be the union voice of their colleagues after their students head home. Karen’s tears were for those students as much as for her own 10-year-old son. Karen’s tears were for the children who had been drinking contaminated water for over a year; poisoned water. She worries that they have been harmed in ways that might not show for years.
Darlene is a 6th-grade science teacher. She and her grandkids have been drinking the water. Yet she was more interested in telling me about her students. One of them asked her, “Am I going to die?” She says that her children are traumatized. They develop rashes if they bathe in the water. Mothers are afraid to wash clothes in it. There are so many poor families here. There is nowhere for them to go.
One after another, these educators told me their stories. Stories of their own families and stories of the students. They were frightened and angry and confused about how something so cruel and callous had happened to them and their community – a community that’s gone through tough times before, but nothing like this. Not poison coming through the kitchen faucet.
You’ve no doubt read about the Flint water crisis. It’s in all the papers. You may know that Governor Rick Snyder and his friends in the legislature have been systematicallycutting taxes on the One Percent and balancing the books by defunding public infrastructure for some time now. They’ve underfunded public schools, public health, and even the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which tests (or is supposed to test) the water.
It wasn’t an act of God that devastated this town. It wasn’t an Oklahoma twister or a Gulf Coast hurricane. Manmade cuts in public funding made rubble of public services and provided the excuse for Snyder to declare a fiscal “emergency” wherein the governor can replace the elected officials in a city with his handpicked “emergency” manager to find “efficiencies.”
By the way, the people of Michigan didn’t like that law that gave the governor the power to strip local elected leaders of their authority and Michiganders overturned it on public referendum. But the governor was not to be dissuaded by mere voters and with a little pixie dust, he rewrote the law with a magical minor change that created a loophole designed to make it immune to public referendum.
Defying voters, he charged ahead, declaring Flint unfit to govern itself and with unrestrained arrogance, installed his man with austerity marching orders to cut costs, cut services, and cut corners. The result was this puny bureaucrat’sdecision to switch the water supply from Lake Huron (which was working just fine) to the filthy Flint River (which wasn’t). It saved money.
Another savings came from not bothering with the processes to ensure the new water source was safe. The emergency manager didn’t listen to doctors who starting seeing health problems. He didn’t care. His job was to balance the budget. He did. For over a year, the residents of Flint – the nursing mothers; the grandpas; the kindergarteners; the track team; patients in the hospital; firefighters; grocery store cashiers; teachers and bus drivers; everyone – drank the water. Everyone was being slowly poisoned.
This act of incompetence; of negligence is shameful beyond words. But an emerging paper trail of evidence shows that the bureaucrats knew what was happening and covered it up to protect their own skins. It is environmental racism and economic injustice in a city that’s mostly minority and mostly poor. That’s criminal. It better be. It When a Student Asks: Am I Going to Die? - Lily's Blackboard:
