Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha Character Analysis

The road behind my family disappeared too. The Iraq they knew was lost, replaced by war and ruins. In my mind, this lost Iraq is a land of enchantment and despair. But its lessons endure.

This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. More bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it. It is a story about what happens when the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children.

There’s an expression I have always liked, a D. H. Lawrence distillation: The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.

“If Miguel’s right that Flint is not using corrosion control, that means there’s lead in Flint's water.”

“Lead in the water?”

[…] “And based on Miguel’s memo,” she went on, “the lead levels in the Flint water are really, really high. He suspects that MDEQ isn’t testing correctly. That’s why he leaked the memo.”

“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head. “Why would anybody at the EPA need to leak their own memo?”

Elin cocked her head and just stared at me, deadpan. She was waiting for me to catch up.

“He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible.”

Being a pediatrician—perhaps more than any other kind of doctor—means being an advocate for your patient. It means using your voice to speak up for kids. We are charged with the duty of keeping these kids healthy.

We took an oath.

Where had we been?

Where had I been?

If it weren’t for Snow’s science, stubbornness, persistence, and passion for the truth, cholera might have raged on for another decade or more, taking thousands or even millions of lives.

Urban poverty is less lethal now, but in some respects, nothing has really changed. The environments of the cities we live in—their dirt and air, their violence and hopelessness and stress, their water—can still predict how long a life we will have.

Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.

No single bad decision or unfortunate event created modern Flint. The greatest forces working against the city were racism and the corporate greed of GM, which pulled out of Flint, the city that birthed and nurtured it, to satisfy financial problems caused by a lack of imagination.

It was real, something that was happening all around us, the blood of our own patients, and water that flowed in the pipes of our own city where we sat. The residents were engaged in a way I’d rarely seen before, vibrating with a weird new energy, tense but invigorated by the feeling that we were finally doing something. And our results weren’t going to be stuffed away in a digital archive and forgotten. Our results could change our world.

I thought about everything he’d been through, largely preventable, all the toxic stresses: violence, fear, bullet wounds, hospital visits, surgeries, and PTSD, and then the effects of lead poisoning. For many people, life isn’t long enough to recover from a childhood like that.

A sea of red tape lay between me and an official health advisory which would hopefully free up resources and qualify the city for bottled water, filters, and other aid.

For the hundredth time, I wondered: Is the official indifference because these are Flint kids? Poor kids? Black kids? Kids who already have every adversity in the world piled up against them?

A central tenet of [environmental justice] is that local communities must have control over their environments—and decide whether a pipeline gets a permit, or a wind turbine gets built instead of a natural gas plant. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—both for the environment and for public health.

“Just so you know what’s ahead,” Mark went on, “it could get rough. Many whistle-blowers, even if they’re successful in exposing fraud, have their lives destroyed. […] Many are retaliated against. I have clients who have lost their homes and friends, their marriages destroyed. One even killed himself. That’s why I always counsel new clients—even though they’re doing the right thing—that they need to seriously consider the costs. You have to be prepared for the worst.”

This is what it means to be a member of a family, to have people in your life who trust you and support you and who know you sometimes better than you know yourself. […] What we had was more than love. We understood each other. We were grounded in the same core ideals and morals—and were always moving toward the same goal: to make the world more just, more equitable, and a more human place. To do the right thing, even if it was hard.

What I love most about his story is Nuri’s bravery, persistence, and unfailing loyalty to a borderless progressive cause. He fought for something bigger than a country or a religion, a tribe or an ethnic group. He fought for all people, for humanity, with a hope that there was another way to live.

Down deep, something else was eating away at me. Aeb. It was difficult to describe without using the imprecise word shame. It was not just an Iraqi thing; it was an Arabic thing. It was the idea that you were never acting independently of your family or larger community. You always had a connection to a larger group, and there were always repercussions. If you behaved badly, or strayed even a little bit from the accepted norm, you would bring shame not only upon yourself but on your people. There was nothing worse.

Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. […] I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.

I was drawing on something deep inside me. Maybe it was the letters my mom received from Haji in Baghdad, or the pictures I’d seen of the gassing of the Kurdish babies. Maybe it was the tenacity and optimism of Mama Evelyn or the strength and integrity of my dissident parents. Maybe it was the inspiration of my heroes, fighters like Alice Hamilton. […] Or maybe there was even something in my DNA, an ancestral inheritance of persistence and rebellion and activism, handed down to me from the generations of prolific scribes who had hoped to keep Nestorian traditions alive, or from Nuri […] with his brave rebellion, or from Paul Shekwana with his passion for public health.

Again and again, the state and federal officials’ disdain for Flint was shocking.

At the EPA, when asked about using federal money to buy water filters for city residents, the Region 5 Water Division chief […] wrote to the regional administrator and others, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.”

The pointed cruelty. The arrogance and inhumanity.

Sometimes it is called racism. Sometimes it is called callousness. And sometimes […] it can be called manslaughter.

Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans.

I was just the last piece. The state wouldn’t stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell.

Mv family came to the United States basically as refugees fleeing oppression, in search of a peaceful and prosperous place for my brother and me to grow up. The American Dream worked for us. […]

Yes, people are still running to America, or at least trying to. It remains the epitome of prosperity for the entire world, the richest country that ever was. But there really are two Americas, aren’t there? The America I was lucky to grow up in, and the other America—the one I see in my clinic every dry.

“A small bird few down and tugged at the hem of his white dishdasha. The bird told Haji that he would take him to the doctor. But Haji laughed at the small bird, wondering how such a tiny bird could carry him. Soon another bird came and took the edge of his sleeve. Another bird came, and another, until hundreds of birds surrounded him. They each held a small piece of his dishdasha, and even his hair and his toes, and together the birds were able to lift him and fly him through the air.”

The road behind my family disappeared too. The Iraq they knew was lost, replaced by war and ruins. In my mind, this lost Iraq is a land of enchantment and despair. But its lessons endure.

This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. More bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it. It is a story about what happens when the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children.

There’s an expression I have always liked, a D. H. Lawrence distillation: The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.

“If Miguel’s right that Flint is not using corrosion control, that means there’s lead in Flint's water.”

“Lead in the water?”

[…] “And based on Miguel’s memo,” she went on, “the lead levels in the Flint water are really, really high. He suspects that MDEQ isn’t testing correctly. That’s why he leaked the memo.”

“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head. “Why would anybody at the EPA need to leak their own memo?”

Elin cocked her head and just stared at me, deadpan. She was waiting for me to catch up.

“He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible.”

Being a pediatrician—perhaps more than any other kind of doctor—means being an advocate for your patient. It means using your voice to speak up for kids. We are charged with the duty of keeping these kids healthy.

We took an oath.

Where had we been?

Where had I been?

If it weren’t for Snow’s science, stubbornness, persistence, and passion for the truth, cholera might have raged on for another decade or more, taking thousands or even millions of lives.

Urban poverty is less lethal now, but in some respects, nothing has really changed. The environments of the cities we live in—their dirt and air, their violence and hopelessness and stress, their water—can still predict how long a life we will have.

Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.

No single bad decision or unfortunate event created modern Flint. The greatest forces working against the city were racism and the corporate greed of GM, which pulled out of Flint, the city that birthed and nurtured it, to satisfy financial problems caused by a lack of imagination.

It was real, something that was happening all around us, the blood of our own patients, and water that flowed in the pipes of our own city where we sat. The residents were engaged in a way I’d rarely seen before, vibrating with a weird new energy, tense but invigorated by the feeling that we were finally doing something. And our results weren’t going to be stuffed away in a digital archive and forgotten. Our results could change our world.

I thought about everything he’d been through, largely preventable, all the toxic stresses: violence, fear, bullet wounds, hospital visits, surgeries, and PTSD, and then the effects of lead poisoning. For many people, life isn’t long enough to recover from a childhood like that.

A sea of red tape lay between me and an official health advisory which would hopefully free up resources and qualify the city for bottled water, filters, and other aid.

For the hundredth time, I wondered: Is the official indifference because these are Flint kids? Poor kids? Black kids? Kids who already have every adversity in the world piled up against them?

A central tenet of [environmental justice] is that local communities must have control over their environments—and decide whether a pipeline gets a permit, or a wind turbine gets built instead of a natural gas plant. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—both for the environment and for public health.

“Just so you know what’s ahead,” Mark went on, “it could get rough. Many whistle-blowers, even if they’re successful in exposing fraud, have their lives destroyed. […] Many are retaliated against. I have clients who have lost their homes and friends, their marriages destroyed. One even killed himself. That’s why I always counsel new clients—even though they’re doing the right thing—that they need to seriously consider the costs. You have to be prepared for the worst.”

This is what it means to be a member of a family, to have people in your life who trust you and support you and who know you sometimes better than you know yourself. […] What we had was more than love. We understood each other. We were grounded in the same core ideals and morals—and were always moving toward the same goal: to make the world more just, more equitable, and a more human place. To do the right thing, even if it was hard.

What I love most about his story is Nuri’s bravery, persistence, and unfailing loyalty to a borderless progressive cause. He fought for something bigger than a country or a religion, a tribe or an ethnic group. He fought for all people, for humanity, with a hope that there was another way to live.

Down deep, something else was eating away at me. Aeb. It was difficult to describe without using the imprecise word shame. It was not just an Iraqi thing; it was an Arabic thing. It was the idea that you were never acting independently of your family or larger community. You always had a connection to a larger group, and there were always repercussions. If you behaved badly, or strayed even a little bit from the accepted norm, you would bring shame not only upon yourself but on your people. There was nothing worse.

Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. […] I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.

I was drawing on something deep inside me. Maybe it was the letters my mom received from Haji in Baghdad, or the pictures I’d seen of the gassing of the Kurdish babies. Maybe it was the tenacity and optimism of Mama Evelyn or the strength and integrity of my dissident parents. Maybe it was the inspiration of my heroes, fighters like Alice Hamilton. […] Or maybe there was even something in my DNA, an ancestral inheritance of persistence and rebellion and activism, handed down to me from the generations of prolific scribes who had hoped to keep Nestorian traditions alive, or from Nuri […] with his brave rebellion, or from Paul Shekwana with his passion for public health.

Again and again, the state and federal officials’ disdain for Flint was shocking.

At the EPA, when asked about using federal money to buy water filters for city residents, the Region 5 Water Division chief […] wrote to the regional administrator and others, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.”

The pointed cruelty. The arrogance and inhumanity.

Sometimes it is called racism. Sometimes it is called callousness. And sometimes […] it can be called manslaughter.

Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans.

I was just the last piece. The state wouldn’t stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell.

Mv family came to the United States basically as refugees fleeing oppression, in search of a peaceful and prosperous place for my brother and me to grow up. The American Dream worked for us. […]

Yes, people are still running to America, or at least trying to. It remains the epitome of prosperity for the entire world, the richest country that ever was. But there really are two Americas, aren’t there? The America I was lucky to grow up in, and the other America—the one I see in my clinic every dry.

“A small bird few down and tugged at the hem of his white dishdasha. The bird told Haji that he would take him to the doctor. But Haji laughed at the small bird, wondering how such a tiny bird could carry him. Soon another bird came and took the edge of his sleeve. Another bird came, and another, until hundreds of birds surrounded him. They each held a small piece of his dishdasha, and even his hair and his toes, and together the birds were able to lift him and fly him through the air.”