What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

“How can your eyes see something,” he’d say, “that your mind doesn’t know?”

Physicians need to be trained to see symptoms of the larger structural problems that will bedevil a child’s health and well-being more than a simple cold ever could.

He was a humanist, someone who believes that people can make the world better. Haji respected everyone’s beliefs and never spoke against any religion. But he didn’t believe that God wanted calamity for anyone—or that anyone deserved to be abandoned to fate or bad luck. He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible. And maybe that’s even better than going to church.”

We don’t think enough about what lies beneath the veneer of the places where we grew up, as if childhood innocence lingers inside us, filtering out anything too complicated or too dark to consider. We step over complex systems every day, walking through history and pretending the darkness isn’t there. But the older I get, the more I want to really understand the world I’m in and how it came to be. I learned that from my parents—to dig deeper and not be afraid of what I might find.

Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.

The public health approach, however, is far wiser than the Kehoe Rule. The Precautionary Principle holds that a product or chemical should be considered unsafe unless the manufacturer can prove otherwise.

we were back in the Bizarro World of the Kehoe Rule, where we had to prove there was danger and harm before anything could be done. The onus was on us.

Many whistle-blowers, even if they’re successful in exposing fraud, have their lives destroyed. They become obsessed, sometimes paranoid, sometimes with good reason. And it’s often a years-long fight. Many are retaliated against. I have clients who have lost their homes and friends, their marriages destroyed. One even killed himself. That’s why I always counsel new clients—even though they’re doing the right thing—that they need to seriously consider the costs. You have to be prepared for the worst.”

The power of money can’t be underestimated, ever. As Karl Marx said, “It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.” Or as the Bible says more succinctly, the love of money is the root of all evil.