I grew up near one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, beautiful Lake Huron. It is a pure lake, fed from glacial waters.
In Saginaw County, we got our water from this mighty lake. It was excellent water, delicious right from the tap, and safe, We had a great water filtration system, the Saginaw Water Works. I remember hearing that our water was considered the finest in the world. It sounds like hyperbole, but I believe the water won in some competitions, so there was some justification to believe it to be true.
A community about 30 miles away from us also had fine water from Lake Huron. That community, Flint, was at the height of middle class comfort in the 60s and 70s. The GM workers were paid enough that they could own their own homes, send their kids to college, take vacations. Poverty and it's ill effects had been significantly beaten back. It's citizens helped make GM the strongest company in the world.
All that evaporated over the last thirty years. Largely abandoned by the company it built, the city went into serious decline. Instead of exemplifying the great success story of the emerging middle class, it now represented it's decline under the Reagan/Bush years, and a global economy where every worker has to compete against the lowest common denominator.
The city government became harder and harder to manage, as the tax base melted into oblivion. The state came up with an emergency management law that allowed the state to come in and, in essence, eliminate the power of the local officials, to overrule their ability to lead, and put themselves over the will of the local residents.
But the goal of these state-imposed managers was not to benefit the city, improve it's resources, put the money into it that it needed to recover. No, the goal was austerity. Strip the locality of it's community services, and replace them with nothing, or the emergency manager's private cronies. Somebody's getting rich off this law, and it ain't the state or the locality. It's private entrepreneurs, human vultures and con men, swooping in to pick off the remains.
In Flint, the State Emergency Manager got rid of the pure water that Flint was drinking and replaced it with water from the contaminated, polluted Flint River. To save money. Yes, to save money. For those of you blaming the Flint city government, just stop. Please, just stop. They have no more ability to make financial decisions than an elementary school student council (probably less). They rubber stamp what Flint's dictator, the state appointed Emergency Manager, comes up with.
So now, everyone in Flint has been poisoned. The amount of lead in the water is unconscionable. An entire generation of children have been damaged. And all in the name of austerity and crony capitalism.
The State Emergency Management legislation needs to go.
The State Emergency Manager responsible for this needs to be indicted.
The Governor of Michigan needs to resign.
And most importantly, Michigan needs to stop being at war with itself. Those in the rural and white areas of the state need to stop looking at other areas of the state as alien and tax drains. Michigan either survives and prospers together, or it goes down together - hard.
Flint and Saginaw and the besieged area I grew up in will never be the same, until the average working person understands he has more in common with the struggling workers in urban areas than they do with the crony capitalists who want to get rich off the backs of those who are striving just to feed their families, and give them access to clean drinking water.
The American dream is not dead.
It lies in the pristine waters of Lake Huron. The waters of hope and kindness lie just offshore. We just have to reach out to them, reach out to each other.
If you seek a beautiful peninsula, Michiganders, look about you. The means are there to be one of the best places to live on Earth. But you can't do it if you view your fellow man as your enemy.
Come together.
Get the sweet waters flowing again.
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