Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday made his first visit to Flint, Michigan, as a presidential candidate, where he participated in a community forum on the city’s water crisis.
The event was a sharp contrast from the candidate’s usual events, and Sanders began the community forum clarifying that this was not a rally. Instead, he spent most of the time listening to Flint residents express a litany of grievances and concerns over their water system, which had been contaminated with lead for nearly two years.
“It is so painful, so horrific that is almost impossible to discuss. But that’s what we’re going to do today,” Sanders said, adding that unless citizens and leaders have the courage to open dialogue, nothing will get accomplished.
There was a reversal of roles as Sanders asked, to no one in particular, various questions on the state of people’s lives in Flint.
“What is the quality of water today? Is it drinkable in the average person’s home?” he asked.
The crowd shouted back, “No!”
Sanders was well-read on the issues of Flint, asking why there weren’t greater efforts to distribute clean water, why the water supply still cost residents so much and how health care providers were handling the explosion of health issues. The more questions the senator asked, the more engaged — and incensed — the crowd grew. Everyone in the room seemed to have a deeply personal and varying account of the problems.
A woman in a “Flint”-emblazoned beanie hat described how her son had been suspended 57 times from school this year; last year it was only once. She said she knew that the lead poisoning was affecting his behavior, but she worried that his school would still dismiss him altogether if he couldn’t conduct himself in the classroom.
One of the panelists described taking a bath at a hotel in Flint recently and feeling her skin burn afterwards.
Partisan politics were not completely absent from the conversation. More than one member of the audience expressed concern over Gov. Rick Snyder’s leadership, with one young man asking, “Why has our governor not been arrested for poisoning us?
Since the city’s tainted water and subsequent health problems were revealed earlier this year, Sanders has been vocal in his disgust over what he perceives as government mismanagement, and has called on Snyder, a Republican, to resign. He reiterated that call Thursday, adding that Snyder has engaged in a “dereliction of duty.”
Sanders has a field office in Flint and conducted a private meeting with families affected by the crisis when he was in Michigan shortly before the Nevada caucuses.
He struggled to describe the meeting when he took the stage last week at a rally in Dearborn, saying he cannot fathom a United States of America that allows children to be poisoned in 2016.
“The bottom line is, when you left that meeting, you thought, ‘What country am I living in? Is this the United States of America?’ I fear that Flint is the canary in the coalmine here,” he told the crowd.
Sanders, who focuses on big-picture economic and equality philosophies during his lengthy stump speeches, softened when he shared the story of a mother who watched her “bright young daughter” mentally deteriorate before her eyes.
In the past couple of days, he’s been weaving Flint into his stump speech as an example of the crumbling infrastructure that he sees plaguing the U.S.
On Wednesday night in a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he outright called it “a disaster.”
“But if anybody here thinks Flint, Michigan, is the only city in America with a collapsing infrastructure, you would not be right,” Sanders said. “We need to invest in rebuilding our water systems, our wastewater plants, our roads, our bridges, our rail system. And when we do that, we’ll create millions of decent-paying jobs.”
Thursday’s meeting ended with little resolve other than a few calls of action for the senator to take these issues back to Washington and to Congress.
“What we have got to do … is not only rebuild Flint but we have to as a nation, we have got to get our priorities right,” he said to a crowd that offered a standing ovation as he concluded.
The only real mention of presidential politics was one woman who piped up at the end, yelling, “Don’t forget to vote in the primary.”
Sanders is focusing his energy on Super Tuesday states and beyond, essentially leaving South Carolina, which holds its primary on Saturday, to Clinton. Michigan holds its primary on March 8.