One of the greatest American documentaries is certainly Michael Moore's Roger & Me. It hit the screens in 1989 and vividly presented the massive deindustrialization of Flint, Michigan—the center of a metropolitan area that once supplied General Motors with 80,000 workers. Three years after the film was released, that number dropped to 50,000. And the year the citizens of that city began drinking poisoned water, 2014, it was down to 5,000. The city is presently bankrupt, contains a large black population, and has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.

Under Rick Snyder, a Republican governor, Michigan tried to save a little money by switching the source of the city's water. This eventually resulted in 100,000 people being poisoned by bad water for a considerable length of time. There is, of course, a connection between what one sees in Roger & Me (the economic dispossession of thousands of Americans in the Reagan years) and the current water crisis in that city.

Moore is correct: It is useless to send bottles of water to Flint. The problem is too huge, and the damage has already been done. Nothing can fix the situation. Something that should never have happened was permitted to happen. The ideology of austerity has became a reality of lifelong illnesses and in some cases even death. America has to face these hard facts directly. A country with a whole lot of money deprived many of its citizens of the most basic of human rights.

Moore's words:

This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison 100,000 people every day for two years – and get away with it. That took a Governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on widening the income inequality gap... It was those actions that led Michigan’s Republican Governor to try out his economic and racial experiment in Flint (and please don’t tell me this has nothing to do with race or class; he has removed the mayors of a number of black cities. This, and the water crisis in Flint, never would have been visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe—and everyone here knows that).

Indeed, imagine if this had happened on Mercer Island. Our governor, Jay Inslee, would have fled the state at night in the back of a truck transporting apples and spent the rest of his life in some forest, living on lichens and whatever else he could find on and under rocks. Rick Snyder is still around (Moore's main grievance). He is still weathering the bad publicity and seems to have no plans to step down. In fact, he is still skimping—he does not want to pay for new pipes. NBC news:

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told MSNBC on Wednesday morning that pipe replacement is "the first thing" the government needs to address. "That's what the citizens of Flint deserve," she said. "Nobody's going to trust the water if we don't do that."

But Snyder said the state's not ready for that.

Why? Because black lives do not matter as much as white ones. And poor lives, in general, do not matter as much as rich ones. Forty percent of the people in Flint live below the poverty line.