A day off in Flint. William Miller got his hair cut and his van fixed up. Then he needed something to drink, so he did what people here do, still, three years into this fiasco.
He drove to the parking lot beside the boarded-up bowling alley that says “ESTAURANT” on the side. He stopped at the four stop signs. He gave his address and his order to a woman holding a clipboard and wearing a fluorescent yellow vest.
“Twelve!” LaKrisha Shumon shouted ahead, and Miller, a 49-year-old surgical assistant who also owns a medical transport business, crept forward so that the men in vests could load the van with 12 free cases of Walmart’s Great Value Purified Drinking Water.
He comes every week. His anger has not subsided.
“It’s disgusting,” Miller, a trim man with a goatee and a grey college sweatshirt, said in an interview out his car window. “I should not have to do this. I’m a middle-class person. This is not the way life is supposed to be in this country. It’s morally reprehensible.” ... The warning letters arrived in Flint mailboxes in early March. Their demand, of almost unfathomable audacity, is delivered in red capital letters, underlined for emphasis: pay for your poison or else.
Snyder’s government, which was largely responsible for the water disaster, announced in February that it would stop giving Flint residents subsidies for their water. Mayor Karen Weaver then decided to resume the practice of shutting off the water for people with unpaid bills.
Coercive water shut-offs are controversial in the U.S. under normal circumstances, castigated by the United Nations as a violation of human rights. In Flint, which charged people some of the highest water rates in the country for killer gunk, the threats have been greeted with a mix of astonishment and told-you-so resignation.
“The people in Flint should not have to pay for water for at least a decade,” Hanna-Attisha said.
Thousands of residents have been refusing to pay for a year or more. Some say they will continue the protest even though parents without running water are regularly investigated by child protection authorities.
“I’m not going to give them one penny,” said Nakiya Wakes, 41, a stay-at-home-mom-turned-activist who owes $822.62. She had two miscarriages before the authorities warned pregnant women not to drink Flint water, and she believes the lead is also responsible for the worsening behaviour of her 8-year-old son, who has been suspended from school dozens of times.
Mays, a combative woman with a jagged sense of humour and little regard for social niceties, said she will try come up with an “insane” solution, like rigging up a cistern for an outdoor shower, rather than relent.
“Everyone says, ‘You guys just want something for free.’ No, we just don’t want to pay to have ourselves killed,” Mays, 38, said over her usual snack of coffee and pickles at a Flint bookstore-cafe. “I’m not going to pay a hit man to kill me.”