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February 4 - February 10, 2020
As Frederick Douglass said, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Navy SEALs and other special ops medics train in Flint because the city is the country’s best analogue to a remote, war-torn corner of the world.
Unnatural Causes, a seven-hour PBS documentary about socioeconomic and racial disparities in healthcare in America and their root causes.
When a city doesn’t generate enough tax revenue because property taxes don’t bring in enough money, the poor people who live there are punished with higher utility bills. It’s very regressive thinking, asking poor people to pay a higher share of their income than other residents for basic public health protections like water or adequate plumbing.
The average annual Flint residential water bill in 2015 was $864—about $300 more than in any other city in Michigan. In fact, it was the highest in the nation.
Addressing a public health crisis or curing a disease is like solving a mystery, usually with just the right mix of instinct, insight, footwork, solid data, strategy, and pure luck.
According to a recent review, as many as one million lives could be saved worldwide each year if more people washed their hands.
In my mind, it wasn’t a coincidence that D.C. and Flint are both places, in different ways, that lack adequate political representation—places where democracy is far from complete. Flint had been taken over by the governor’s emergency manager, but at least the residents could still vote, in Senate and House elections, for politicians who—if we could get them to pay attention—would represent them.
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.
Lead. It was real. The impact was there in the numbers.
activists were “hysterical”—that code word for “stupid woman, overreacting”—while the industry’s work to improve gasoline was based purely on rational science.
GM would discontinue use of TEL immediately if it could be proven to be harmful. This established a new precedent—later used by the asbestos and tobacco industries for decades—that forced public health advocates to prove harm before action could be taken.
“Safe until proven dangerous” became known as Kehoe’s Paradigm, or the Kehoe Rule. The approach was later taken by climate change deniers.
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.
By 1965, according to the work of geochemist Clair Patterson at Caltech—who inadvertently stumbled onto the man-made contamination of lead in the environment while on a quest to determine the age of the earth—the average American had one hundred times more lead in her body than her ancient ancestors did.
Modern history tells us the story of how powerful industry is—from cigarette companies to gun manufacturers—all over the world, more powerful than the collective voices and protests of individuals.
In 1955 the director in charge of “health and safety” for the Lead Industries Association described childhood lead poisoning as primarily a “slum problem” and a “major ‘headache’…the only real remedy lies in educating a relatively uneducable category of parents.”
The story of lead is like the story of tobacco in some ways, except the lead industry was never forced to pay a price for its greed, for the damage it caused, or for its attempts to ruin and discredit the great scientists who spent their professional lives fighting on behalf of its victims. Those victims were more than simply innocent—they were kids. They were babies.
That is the legacy of Charles Franklin Kettering, the American inventor, engineer, businessman, and philanthropist, a holder of 186 patents and a man of platitudes and corporate pop-optimism. His work added more lead to the environment and to children’s blood than any other application of the metal. It is one of the largest environmental crimes ever.
Before industrialization, children rarely had lead in their bodies. It was due only to industrial greed and convenience that it was mined and released into the environment. Even the ancient Romans suspected it was dangerous, even deadly, but we in the modern age allowed it—we looked the other way and let convenience drive policy.
Econometrics studies looking at worldwide crime trends also show an astonishing correlation between a “lead curve” and a “crime curve.” Where consumption of leaded gasoline declines, so does violent crime.
Medical science has now concluded there is no safe level of lead in the human body.
When people tell you that government is inept and ineffective, all you have to do is remind them of the good work that the right policies can achieve.
In recent times, water in the United States was supposed to be protected by the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), first issued in 1991 as part of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
It took a decade, but Lansing is now the only city in the country besides Madison to have replaced all its lead service lines.
the lack of MDEQ oversight violated both the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Lead and Copper Rule.
I told them how GM had stopped using the water a year before because it was corroding engine parts, but we were still expecting the kids of Flint to drink it.
“Because this isn’t about what happens to you if you do something. This is about what happens—or doesn’t happen—if you don’t do something.”
To do the right thing, even if it was hard.
Challenging injustice means standing up for the weak, the vulnerable, the abused, and the forgotten—be it in health, employment, education, or the environment. It means being vigilant on behalf of people who are treated as pariahs and scapegoats, populations that are dehumanized, displaced, and treated as disposable. It means fighting oppression at every opportunity—no matter the place or country.
People listen to dollar signs. (Wasn’t that how we got into this mess?)
what mattered wasn’t politics or political philosophy—it was Flint’s kids. That was ground I was willing to stand on with anybody.
I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.
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.
I don’t care about your apology. I care about action. I cared about getting enough funding, and the interventions, and how things would work out for the kids of Flint for the next few decades. I would have to work with this governor and many governors to come.
The state of Michigan didn’t need less government; it needed more and better government, responsible and effective government. And people who are not being poisoned by the tap water.
For decades, the city and state infrastructure had been neglected in order to save money. State environmental and health agencies had been defunded, and great public servants had become disillusioned and retired, leaving these agencies a shadow of what they were supposed to be. All the budget cuts and so-called fiscal “responsibility” had resulted in a winner-take-all culture, a disdain for regulations and career regulators, a rubber-stamping of bad ideas, a gross underfunding of environmental enforcement, limited understanding of and expertise in public health, and a disregard for the poor.
“Everybody knows that this [water crisis] would not have happened in predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor,” Michael Moore wrote in Time. “Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns…. “This is a racial crime. If it were happening in another country, we’d call it an ethnic cleansing.”
I realized that America has changed a lot since I was a little girl. Yes, people are still running to America, or at least trying to. It remains the epitome of prosperity for the entire world, the richest country that ever was. But there really are two Americas, aren’t there? The America I was lucky to grow up in, and the other America—the one I see in my clinic every day.
