The Little Voice In My Head (as submitted to Highestwire)

Submitted by Brian Wohlberg on Wednesday, August 11, 2004 at 02:50:20 AM EST.

GM helped Flint explode. Hi-res version of photo (58 K)

I live in Flint. ("That's a contradiction in terms!" Ba-dum-dum!) No, really, I do live in Flint. ("My condolences! I guess someone has to!") No, honestly, I live in Flint. ("Well, will you turn out the lights when you leave?")

I hear these responses a lot, and recently they've gotten me thinking. And what it's gotten me thinking about is politics, and I have reached a remarkable conclusion: The downfall of Flint is the fault of good, honest, hardworking, God-fearing conservatives like you. It's your fault, and you don't even know it.

Before you go screaming "he's a damned liberal," let me say up front I am not a liberal. My parents vote Republican, my grandparents voted Republican, and until yesterday, when I had a sudden realization, I would have voted Republican too because I didn't know any better. It's what I was brought up with, and while I had thought about it I had never, you know, thought about it deeply. But I'm not a liberal, not really. I don't go in much for the Democratic Party and I wouldn't know which end of a Grateful Dead CD is up. So don't go hiding behind a chorus of "liberal bias" because it's not true.

And it's still your fault.

Have you ever seen "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore? Probably not if you're a conservative. Conservatives have no sense of humor about these things. Well, like I said, I live in Flint, and up here it's required viewing. I'm home schooled but I understand it's shown in most high schools around here ("Damned brainwashing by a liberal curriculum," says the conservative voice), and it's the history of Flint in modern times. The story goes like this: GM sets up shop in Flint. GM finds more profitable place to set up shop. GM leaves. Flint goes to hell on a fast-moving train. Within a few years Flint loses nearly fifty thousand jobs. The Flint Chamber of Commerce does a poll afterwards, and nearly 45% of Flint residents said they would "move immediately if they could." Schools die. Downtown dies.

Flint dies.

In the meantime, GM executives take a huge cut of their profits. From 1983 to 1989 Flint took in record profits.

And conservatives--they cheered GM for this. "It's the free market," they said. "The bottom line is what's important," they said. "In the long term this is what's best for the economy," they said. "The people in Flint are poor now because they're not willing to work hard enough," they say now.

I could overlook that. I did overlook that. So did my parents, including my father, who actually lost his job because of this. So did my grandparents. Maybe it was best in the long term, though if you've ever visited where I live ("Who would?") you'd wonder how.

Have you ever visited a Flint school? ("Neither have Flint students!") I have, even though I don't go to school there myself. I am home schooled because the schools, frankly, stink. MEAP scores in Genesee County schools are below the state average in every category in grades 4-8, and Flint schools, proper, are far worse. Flint schools are under funded compared to their needs because Proposal A, which was promoted by conservatives, limited funding, and because Flint residents cannot truly afford to have bond issues to improve buidlings that are literally falling apart.

I went to a Flint school the other day. Flint Northern is probably not the worst school in the world to visit, but it's close. The building itself was, literally, falling apart. I saw two drug deals and two fights in the hour I was there. I saw many empty and semi-empty classrooms with glassy-eyed teachers and glassy-eyed students staring at outdated textbooks with very little relevance to the students' own lives.

Over 65% of the students in Flint qualify for a "free lunch," which means they're very poor indeed. I imagine it's very difficult to learn when you're worried about making ends meet.

And conservatives? They say what's needed is privatization. "The free market will provide better schools," they say. "A private school will pop up that will not only be profitable for the people who run it but better for students too." "It's the community's fault," they say. "What we need is a standard curriculum and religious education," they say. And most of all, they say, "No new funding for schools."

What they need is more funding and teachers with the capacity to care and a community with the luxury of spending time at home with their children. But I could overlook that too. I did overlook that. So do my parents. Sure, maybe it's possible that a private company would teach them the things they need to improve their lot in life. Maybe the company will care, not that GM seemed to.

Have you ever visited a hospital in Flint? ("No, the line was too long to deal with the gunshot wounds.") I volunteer at a local hospital in the afternoons, in fact, as part of my home schooling. Flint is well above the state average in low-birthweight babies, and well above state average in infant mortality. It is also well below the state average in prenatal care. More babies die in Flint each year because their parents are poor than in nearly anywhere else in the developed world, nearly 16 out of every 1,000 pregnancies.

And conservatives? They say we shouldn't put tax dollars into prenatal care programs or offer a national health care program that includes everyone. We shouldn't fund programs for parenting classes, because that would be communism and a welfare state. The problem, they say, is that Flint has too many poor people, and poor people simply shouldn't have babies because they become a burden on society.

I shouldn't overlook that, I really shouldn't, but I did. So do my parents. It's easy to overlook it because I live in a "nice" part of Flint and I don't have to see that rough parts every day and because I didn't actually know any poor people myself, so it was easy to generalize about why their problems exist.

So what caused my realization? That conservatives were at fault?

As I said before, I volunteer at a local hospital. Yesterday I fed a very kind lady who needed physical assistance. She told me her story. It was a common one, I'm sure. It seems she used to work at the GM plant until the jobs disappeared ("The GM people did what they had to do for their stock holders! It's the American way!"). Her husband, who was killed in a drive-by shooting, had a life-insurance policy, but somehow the money was never paid out due to a technicality. ("Insurance companies shouldn't be regulated! That's big government!") With three kids she worked three part-time jobs that came to about half the pay of her old job, but they got by. But she was gone nearly 18 hours of the day to work and she had to find day care for the kids, one of which was very impaired (a complication at birth, possibly as a result of mercury poisoning from a job she used to have). ("It's not the government's job to regulate businesses!" "She didn't have to work there if she didn't want to!") Then while waitressing in the evenings she slipped and fell. She needed surgery or physical therapy on her back but none of her jobs offered health care. ("Privatized health care is the best form of health care in the world! Socialized medicine is wrong!") So she continued to work until she lost use of her left leg entirely. She had to go on assistance for a few years after that to support her children, since she was unable to work. ("Welfare and medicare is wrong because people take advantage of the system!") Then things got really bad.

A nurse came in and saw her youngest child. She told the patient the child would have to leave soon. And as we walked out of the room she said, and I'll never forget this, "People like that shouldn't have children!" And she proceeded to tell me how good it was that the Republicans "got rid of the welfare system so people like that couldn't have babies on our tax dollars anymore."

That's when I realized the problem. The problem is so simple I never saw it before. I had always thought that conservatives meant it when they talked about "family values" and returning to "community standards," but you know something? It's a line of crap. Because families care for each other. Communities work together. Conservatives could care less about this lady, they could care less about Flint, because, and this is the important part, they don't feel responsible for her. That's right, conservatives are irresponsible. And that's immoral.

It's conservative irresponsibility that causes us to look down on a hardworking, down-on-her-luck woman in a hospital bed and say "Not my problem." It's conservative irreponsibility that allows babies to die at a ridiculous rate in Flint because "national health care is wrong." It's conservative irresponsibility that presumes that the reason schools fail is because they're funded too well, that that money should be reinvested with the wealthy.

And it's conservative irresponsibility that has killed Flint.

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