Water

The crisis in Flint, Michigan, is unconscionable. Two years ago, someone made a suggestion and a group of people voted and someone allowed a decision not to provide people with the most basic service of government: safe water. They decided to go part-way – perhaps three-fifths of the way – toward allowing people to live. That decision was despicable, and people will die because the government carried too great a burden with too few resources and too little conscience. 

The crisis in Flint is the result of a decision, and we must hold that policymaker responsible. But this crisis is more than one person’s crime: the poison in Flint’s water is a manifestation of a poisoned culture that cares too little about black bodies. Amidst all newborn America’s great dreams for a democratic Garden of Eden, sin slithered in, and we have been compromising ever since. 

This crisis is horrifying, but its causes are not shocking news. Our racial politics are made visible every day in school suspension rates and in black bodies shot dead in the streets. What shocks me is that those of us who know better, who know that black lives matter and that we will not be whole until our society reflects that, are still compromising. Somewhere along the lines, we have decided that just for now, we will fight for black bodies, and deal with the brown ones later. And we are poisoning those bodies still. 

The ABC affiliate in Flint is reporting that undocumented residents only learned that Flint’s water was poisoned “a couple weeks ago.” Increasingly isolated by ICE raids explicitly targeting families, people living undocumented in Flint for decades never knew that the well had soured. And now they are afraid to seek safe water because they fear they will leave their house for a bottle and never come home. 

The Bible is full of reminders to be kind to those who come from a foreign land. Perhaps those reminders are so frequent because in crisis it is easy to compromise the lives of those unlike us. It is easy to balance the broken budget on black backs. It is easy to give our beleaguered president a few wins on homeland security at the expense of brown families. It is easy to deny the water of life to a stranger for our own convenience. Justice will be harder.