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A Scandal in Three Tenses

In Jacksonville, Mississippi, a primarily African-American community, the citizens have no drinkable water. Their water-processing plants have broken down after years of neglect. Whatever local, state, and federal resources for upkeep managed not to be used for them. 

It is rare these days to have a smoking gun about racism; folk (other than right-wing pundits) rarely write down or say in public that they will mistreat people for being of color. It is in comparison with others that we see the differential in treatment; how many predominantly white communities do without potable water.

Present tense:  people need safe water to live let alone thrive. It sounds as if massive amounts of bottled water are being delivered but it is a drop in the bucket. More resources are needed; perhaps the powers that be could be persuaded to treat the city as if it were all-white.

Future tense: a massive investment into bringing their water-processing plants up to standard is needed. Again the powers that be must be persuaded to treat the city the same way that it treats all-white cities.

Past tense: the folk in charge responsible for allowing this to happen should not continue to be in charge but should be fired. There should be thorough investigations into how resources managed not to be used for Jackson and when laws were broken the lawbreakers should be prosecuted, for that is how our society establishes right and wrong for all to see.

None of this is likely to happen in the dark; this is a scandal that only is healed when light is shown on it, for as long as it takes. It is media attention to government failures that allows democracies to out-perform tyrannies in keeping up their end of the social contract.

I regularly read about the part of the civil rights movement that occurred in my childhood as a way of trying to make sense of the world that I grew up in. It both gives me hope in the face of immense challenges that persistent good can make things better, and despair that we have the same types of issues decades later.

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