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Above: Part of Time magazine's online presentation, posted Thursday morning.

Flint's man-made water catastrophe is the biggest national story to come out of Michigan since Kwame Kilpatrick and auto industry bailouts.

It has been network newscasts' lead topic repeatedly this week, is the focus of a New York Times column today by Charles Blow and is on the latest Time magazine cover.

"An emergency that had been brewing largely out of sight has erupted into a national concern," Time writer Josh Sanburn says in his article, which is behind a subscription paywall. (An accompanying commentary by Michael Moore is here.)  


Sincere Smith, a Flint 2-year-old, is in this cover photo by Regina H. Boone of the Detroit Free Press.

Sanburn quotes the president , Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Flint residents.

President Obama weighed in during a visit to Detroit on Jan. 20, "I know that if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself that my kids' health could be at risk," he said. "It is a reminder of why you can't shortchange basic services that we provide to our people."

The magazine journalist, like Blow, Moore and others, calls out Gov. Rick Snyder:

Over the past month, the wheels of government, which had barely turned for over a year, creaked into action.

On Jan. 12, seven days after declaring a state of emergency, Snyder mobilized the National Guard to patrol the city and hand out water. Four days later, President Obama designated Flint as a federal emergency area and freed $5 million in aid.

And on Jan. 20, as calls for him to resign over his handling of the crisis grew louder, Snyder used his State of the State address to announce that he was seeking $28 million in state funding for Flint while offering a belated apology. 

In his sidebar essay, filmmaker-activist Moore is characteristically blunt:

The people of my hometown, Flint, Mich., are being poisoned. Let me not mince words: This is a racial crime. If it were happening in another country, we’d call it an ethnic cleansing.

Flint is a very poor, majority African-American city, and the Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, knows they have no political power, no lobbyists, no money. And they didn’t vote for him.

So when the residents of Flint, many of whom work two or three jobs for minimum wage, complained about the levels of lead in their water and told the governor their children were getting sick – two years ago! – he didn’t have to listen.

Everybody knows that this would not have happened in predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor. Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns.


Charles Blow: "It is hard to imagine this happening in a city that didn’t have Flint’s demographic profile." (Facebook photo)

At The Times, columnist Blow expresses shock and outrage under a headline similar to Time's: "The Poisoning of Flint." He writes:

An entire American city exposed to poisoned water. How could this be?

It is hard to imagine this happening in a city that didn’t have Flint’s demographic profile — mostly black and disproportionately poor. . . .  Officials apparently kept assuring residents that things were under control, even though many residents knew intuitively that they were not.

Blow's second sentence salutes Curt Guyette of the ACLU of Michigan, "a longtime investigative journalist who had done tremendous work bringing the Flint water crisis to light."

The Manhattan columnist met Guyette, formerly of Metro Times, when they each spoke at an ACLU dinner in Dearborn two months ago. "I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t heard about this crisis before that night," writes the Times columnist.

Now he and any American who keeps up with news knows what went terribly wrong for a long time in Flint.