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

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Distributing filters and bottled water was not enough. Government had to provide a long-term solution. People cannot live on filters and bottled water forever.

on October 8 when Governor Snyder announced that the water would be switched back to Detroit.

During the same press conference, another announcement followed: toxic levels of lead had been found in the water in three Flint schools.

The switch alone wasn’t enough to deliver clean, safe water to the city. Eighteen months of corrosive water had done great damage to the underground network of water pipes, and it had also corroded the pipes and appliances in residents’ homes. The water was not yet safe to drink. Much more remediation was still needed.

The governor’s office had invited me, but that didn’t mean I had to toe their line and smile like a fool.

Almost everything I asked for, my entire list of demands—all the wrap-around services for the kids that I had recommended—were, in some shape or form, in the budget.

More than a hundred million dollars of the Michigan budget would be dedicated to Flint kids.

If I had to locate an exact cause of the crisis, above all others, it would be the ideology of extreme austerity and “all government is bad government.” The state of Michigan didn’t need less government; it needed more and better government, responsible and effective government.

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.”

Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life.

Admitting your mistakes, and then doing what you can to rectify them, takes integrity and strength. And in the end, I felt the governor cared—and was truly sorry. This gave me hope, because a man who cares and feels sorry might do more for Flint kids, to rectify his mistakes, than a politician with less at stake. Even if he didn’t care and wasn’t sorry, he knew that the balance of his political career would be judged by his response to this crisis.

I wondered when we were going to learn from our past mistakes, when our policies would finally catch up with science.

Rulemaking for something so crucial should not take almost a decade. Every day children are trapped and held hostage by bureaucratic governmental processes.