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politics&prejudices
The real lessons of Flint by Jack Lessenberry
The poisoned water tragedy of Flint is a movie waiting to be made. You have heroes — the noble doctor Mona HannaAttisha, the dedicated researcher Marc Edwards, the brilliant, quirky, and driven investigative reporter Curt Guyette. You’ve got villains: The clueless “relentless positive” accountant governor fixated on the bottom line: the smug emergency managers and the bureaucrats at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, plus the arrogant press spokesman who belittled anyone who asked about lead. And you’ve got victims — thousands of victims — children needlessly poisoned by an out-of-touch government. What isn’t clear, however, is how Hollywood would see the moral of the story. What’s more important is how America sees it. The biggest mistake we could make is to pin it all on Rick Snyder and a few of his minions. What we all need to realize is that Flint is a postcard from our future, unless we get serious about fixing this nation. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Too many of us are being left behind, and much of what’s left of the shrinking middle-class economy is really a house of cards. Consider one small example: The looming tower of student loan debt. Eight years ago, before the Great Recession hit, the cumulative total was only about $500 billion. Now, it is $1.3 trillion — a figure increasing at the cost of $2,000 every second — the balloon mortgage payment from hell, threatening to swamp our future. This exists in large part because the selfish greedheads who own Congress and our legislatures are no longer willing to pay their fair share in taxes to support higher education. Not only that, as the law is presently written, kids can’t even refinance their debt. Home loans can be refinanced, car loans can be. Even Bubba Gump can refinance his boat loan. But we won’t even help our kids get a more favorable mortgage on their futures. This is, of course, a gigantic house of cards just waiting to collapse. One of my students has completed all her coursework at Wayne State University, but can’t get
22 22 February February 10-16, 10-16, 2016 | metrotimes.com
her degree because she owes the school money. Additionally, she has a student loan debt of $80,000. Last I heard, the only job she could find was cleaning motel rooms. She is never going to be able to pay that back. Nor will millions of others. Some will postpone marriage or child-bearing or be unable to buy a house. Others will just get behind and then default. Yet do you see anyone in power doing anything about this? Do you see anyone proposing anything real? Well, no — except for Bernie Sanders, that gravelly voiced old (gasp) socialist. He would allow students to refinance student loans, refuse to allow the government to make a profit on them, and eventually move to a system that would allow deserving students to get through college debt-free. He’d pay for that, by imposing a small tax — way less than 1 percent — on the Wall Street speculators, who, as he put it “nearly destroyed the economy seven years ago.” Naturally, everyone will say that’s impossible. That’s what they always say when anyone proposes making this a better world. Yet once in a while, someone comes along and makes people see that yes, it really might be possible. Nearly half a century ago, Bobby Kennedy did just that. “Some people see things as they are and ask why,” he told enormous and enthusiastic crowds across this nation. “I see things that never were, and say