About the only thing I miss from subscribing to The Detroit Free Press are the columns they used to run regularly featuring Leonard Pitts. For those not familiar with Pitts, he's an exceptionally good op-ed writer for The Miami Herald who has a genuinely unique take on the state of America and isn't afraid to share it, consequences be damned.
As is Pitts' wont, he had a slightly different take than many on the Flint water crisis this past week. Pitts said for all the hoopla over it being just another in a long line of racism run amok in America, what the poisoning of Flint's children is truly about is poverty. Pitts points to the city of Morgantown, West Virginia where whites outnumber blacks and those living beneath the poverty line is near 40%--and says he can easily imagine a similar situation as Flint happening there, but not so much in the Hamptons or Orange County, or any number of wealthy communities across America.
And Pitts is exactly right.
And again I ask: what does it say about a nation when the needs of the privileged few take precedence over the many? Isn't that in many ways what the Pilgrims first came to America to escape? And so many immigrants after them?
Remember this? "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...."
Somehow when the Founding Fathers wrote those words I don't think they envisioned a nation where children would be poisoned for a lack of money.
They wanted us to be better than that.
And so should we.
Peace,
emaycee
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