Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 24

SIXTEEN

For a couple of months, my time in Flint and summer vacation overlap. I regularly encounter children playing in homes or out in the yard, curious about these strangers stacking cases of water in their kitchen and living room. How to explain to a child that something so benign as tap water, so universal a symbol of growing up in these United States, a necessity everyone takes for granted, has been transformed into a dire threat, poison from the spigot, kitchen faucets malign and gleaming?

Everyday experiences are processed and stored in the brain as memory. Research suggests that trauma isn’t integrated into memory at all, but lives on, ever present in the moment, locked within the body. In fifteen, twenty, thirty years, how will the water crisis be remembered by these children, grown to adulthood? How will they cope with neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic levels of lead? What about the cost to society? To taxpayers, saddled with the burden of underwriting an increased need for health care, mental health services, special education, law enforcement, and incarceration? In what ways will trauma betray these kids and reemerge flaring, filtered through the experience of having grown up in Flint?