Michael Moore’s docu-film Fahrenheit 11/9 contains two references to normal and it is no surprise to this author that they are both in relation not to the outright absurdity of the buffoonery that is the Trump presidency, but about something much more innocent, even innocuous: water. And specifically the fucking travesty that is the Flint, Michigan water crisis (I micro-rage every time I think about the situation on the ground there).
The first segment is with April Cook-Hawkins, pastor and former Health Department worker who exposed some of the cover-up in Flint’s poisoning of children via falsified lead level reporting:
(The entire clip of April’s appearance is hosted by Michael Moore’s promotional YouTube account here.)
The second segment spoken by Flint resident Lorenzo Avery Jr. is…shorter, gutting, brutal, to the point. It’s almost poetic in its sadness: the depiction of young children playing with bottled water because they can’t use the tap; filling up water guns with bottled water; and realizing their future, of a life lived where brushing your teeth with bottled water will be…normal:
Oof.
Aside: watch the film. Michael Moore manages to re-connect a few dots from the Trump presidency back to the Flint water crisis (which I’ve been tracking for a while), which is hard to realize how prescient Trump was in his vision, but he was (and it’s something we still take for granted).
