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

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.

The world shouldn't be comprised of people in boxes. Minding their own business. It should be full of people raising their voices, using their power and presence, standing up for what's right. Minding one another's business. That's the world I live in. And that's the world I want to live in.

It was about people and community. That’s what science is supposed to be about—not an academic exercise for the ivory tower, or racking up publications, grants, and offers of tenure. It’s about using the tools and technology available to make lives better, no matter what articles of faith obstruct the path.

Rather than standing on the sidelines, Snow got passionately involved. His work wasn’t about abstract scientific discovery alone. It was about people and community. That’s what science is supposed to be about—not an academic exercise for the ivory tower, or racking up publications, grants, and offers of tenure. It’s about using the tools and technology available to make lives better, no matter what articles of faith obstruct the path.

Physicians need to be trained to see symptoms of the larger structural problems that will bedevil a child’s health and well-being more than a simple cold ever could. But these problems are harder for even a well-trained physician to identify. A child doesn’t come to my exam room for “food insecurity.” Their moms don’t call the clinic for an appointment because “we can’t make ends meet” or “there aren’t any safe places to play outside.” They make appointments because of nosebleeds and ear infections, like other moms, or for well-baby checkups. And when we see them, if we don’t ask about the situation at home or learn to notice the clues on our own, we’ll never find out what these larger problems are. When we know about the child’s environment, we can treat these kids in the best, most holistic way, which will leave them with much more than just a prescription for amoxicillin.

In the little world in which children have their existence,” he wrote in Great Expectations (1861), “there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small.

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.

If we stop believing that government can protect our public welfare and keep all children safe, not just the privileged ones, what do we have left? Who are we as a people, a society, a country, and a civilization?

The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.” On behalf of another group of “unpopular citizens,” he referred to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as the “legalization of racism” in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States. The first justice to ever use the word racism in a Supreme Court opinion, he went on to employ it seven more times before it disappeared from court opinions for two decades.

Before Flint, my career was a total mystery to me," Elin confessed at lunch. "None of it made sense. So many times I have looked back at my choices and career moves and wondered, What was I thinking? But now I see that each move was a piece in the puzzle, so that I could be standing right there in your kitchen at exactly the right time. It all makes sense to me now. There was a point to all those twists and turns.

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. And people who are not being poisoned by the tap water.

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.