Short Story by Angel Carr, Senior

Between life and Death

by Angel Carr

Some stories end in tragedy some in fairytale but this just may be a mixture of both, you see my name is Yara and my life is far from perfect. Right now at this moment I’m already attempting suicide, I’m attempting suicide not because of some boy or some devious bully, I’m committing suicide because of myself and I know I can’t blame everything on myself but in this case I can. I don’t think life is worth living I mean we live in a crazy world where I can be killed by anyone, you can’t get into Lyft or Uber without praying that it won’t be a crazy serial killer, men are being more and more hateful towards women and goddamn Kanye is running for president. I mean what is this world?, a world of deception, jealousy, and most of all greed. I know that if I keep telling myself about the bad things in the world the more and more I don’t blame myself for my suicide. Everything seems to be falling out of place, I’m not the same anymore I used to be on top, the pretty girl, the popular girl that was voted most likely to be Elle Woods from Legally Blonde but the smart version, or so I hope that’s what they meant.

When I was younger my mother used to take me to the beach and I would lay in the sand and look at the waves crashing on the sand just back and forth, back and forth, and that’s just how my life feels my emotions crashing back and forth till one day they all will come crashing down which is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m committing suicide today and there’s absolutely nothing that anyone could do to stop me. If you wanna know about me you don’t have to pry I’m still here to tell you sheesh I’m not dead yet. So my mother is a psychiatrist and she is always coming home late from work and that’s fine I just wish she would slip me some happy pills, she’s very hardworking, and she loves The Cosby show reruns I just wish that our family was like the Cosby’s. We’re far from that but I have a dog named Oliver “Ollie” is his nickname he is the sweetest companion I’ve ever met I take him for walks, I feed him, and I love him. I rescued Ollie from a lamp post when I was 5 but now I’m 16 and Ollie is getting older. We get old together through every hard time, through every tear, through every battle Ollie has been there for me, my only friend, my best friend. I mean we watched the Incredibles together, and he’s been there through slumber  parties and all of my troubles. I still talk about him like he’s still with me but I know he’s not coming back.

Last summer I took Ollie to the park, his favorite park tied him to a pole so I can use the bathroom and I heard loud noises like “Grr” I heard a squeal and ran out and saw Ollie lying there in blood and coyotes running away. So I took him off the leash, picked him up and ran home as fast as I can because I can’t pay for a vet and of course my mother wasn’t home so I tried to save him I put as much pressure on the wound as I could but nothing was helping Ollie was dying and there was not much I could do about it so I sung to him as I was holding him. I sung a rendition of my girl by the temptations and replace it as “My boy” while heavily sobbing that was my first time I ever felt like my emotions were coming into place and I can see how much I cared for Ollie and how I wish he was still with me at a time like this. I bring Ollie up because Ollie would know what to do he’s seen me upset and always was there to make my day better. It’s hard to find someone to lean on and I don’t have my best friend anymore to help me. I feel like I’m suffocating myself by pretending I’m okay ever since Ollie’s death and so many other things that has been happening within me.

My mom took me to therapy when I was younger but it didn’t help I’ve always been someone who was in my shell and all of the friends I had turned their back on me because I’m not as popular as them. I walk around feeling sorry for myself because somehow it must be my fault why people walk into my life to just go away like my father. My father was a huge role model to me when I was little he was the glue that held our family together we did everything together and he loved my mother so much. What they had is what I like to call endless love the undying love he had for her was incredible I need to stop thinking of people that were in my life right now I’m in a bad place because of me, that’s all I can blame not Ollie or my dad just myself. I knew as a kid something was off in my head I always felt sad but since I was kid I didn’t pay attention to it all I knew was my dad was gone and I couldn’t get to see him anymore.

The days my mom was home she always ridiculed me over little things and it made me insecure which is part of the reason why I am like this today but the other half is I was diagnosed with depression at 12 and that’s a very young age and my mother thought I was crazy even though she diagnosed me with it so she used to give me “happy pills” to make me feel better I wish I had them right now.

My life is in such shambles just waiting to crumble around me my boyfriend recently broke up with me. The last thing my ex-boyfriend said to me was “ Hey babe it’s not you, it’s me”. I definitely knew it was me I mean how can someone just leave with no explanation there must be something wrong with me I know it and I know that I’m an emotionally draining person to be around always saying how ugly I look, always being introverted and always looking down. I always relied on my support systems for help but I always tell myself to never get too attached because I know I couldn’t handle myself when they finally leave.

My best friend left too, her name is Diana or should I say the new Elle Woods of our school the “Smart version” I see her everyday and I want to say hey because I just need someone to talk to I don’t because society says we are not socially compatible anymore it’s crazy how high school can drastically change everyone from their personalities, to appearance, and how they talk. I remember last week the closest I got to talking to Diana was accidently bumping into her in the lunch line and her yelling at me saying “Bitch”.

I’m sorry I can’t stay on topic to save my life and now I’m holding these 16 900 mg ibuprofens to numb my pain I’m at home in the bathtub reminiscing on my past then suddenly I heard a voice, not just any voice but my father’s voice I can’t believe it I jumped up and all I hear is “Yara don’t do it, I love you” I looked and said “Dad is that you?”. The next thing I know is I’m seeing my actual childhood the time when my father and I went to the park and danced around and him trying to fit on every seesaw he laid his eyes on, me eating vanilla ice cream cone with sprinkles and him biting almost the whole cone off. He then took me to an amusement park I’m 5 at this time he’s there with a funnel cake and Dippin’ Dots making me go on every carousel he saw he didn’t let me go on the big rides no matter how hard I begged him because he never wanted me to get hurt and that’s what I admired about my dad he always kept me safe from a world I felt was out to get me but the only person that is really out to get me is myself. I feel so insecure without my father in my life he is the greatest person I’ve ever known. He made me feel like I had a golden heart that I could do no harm and swore that I was going to become a famous writer one day.

I keep everything in my journal which I’m writing in as we speak I like to keep memories so when people find me they’ll have my backstory on why I had to do what I had to do. As my flashback of my father continues I think of the night we were coming home from the carnival he played his favorite song called All my life and he was just happily singing it when suddenly a huge semi was coming towards us on the highway he then swerved and all I remember is waking up with a headache and a flashlight flashing in my eye with a lot of first responders around the car. As they were taking me out of the car it was in a ditch and I kept saying “Daddy are you okay?” seeing him still in the car he said “Yeah, sweetheart I’m fine”. I don’t remember much after the accident happened, all I know is mother told me my father was dead. How can that be? We were just singing and laughing he can’t be dead I don’t even understand what that meant all I knew was he wasn’t coming back. I snap back to reality and here I am standing here with the pills in my hand writing down my final thoughts realizing that this isn’t what my father wanted, my father wanted me to be strong for him as much as he was for me I don’t feel like myself at times and it’s fine it’s just the stages of grief I’m going through.

I didn’t think that after almost a decade I’d still feel grief but how can I not feel this way I lost my best friend at a young age and I was and still am too young to process this. Maybe this is why I hate everything about myself, maybe this is why I isolate myself so much, maybe this is why I feel depressed, and how could I not know this what am I doing? These pills aren’t going to bring my father back and these pills going to bring myself back. I have to bring myself back and suddenly I felt a cold chill on my shoulder I turn around and it’s my father I know it is because he wrote “my sweetheart” on the mirror, mirrors don’t write on themselves and as I look into the mirror I see myself crying so much and I see the reflection of my father proud of me as I’m flushing those pills down the toilet. I’m glad I had a guardian angel watching me today what would I do without him and when I’m feeling like hating myself I know he’s there right beside me even if I can’t see him but I can feel him and that’s all that really matters to me so this isn’t going to be the ending but the start of a new chapter of my life of bettering myself so my father can be proud of the daughter he raised and that is worth living for.

Poem by Ethan Naegele, Senior

Poem

By Ethan Naegele

Traveling down the road rife with seemingly indefatigable chaos,

I look in the rear view mirror to warm scenes and warm dreams—

memories that have me swimming in my head so pleasantly.

On the first morning of kindergarten I looked up to a strange sky—

one that caught the orange glow in a way so novel and breathtaking,

The same sky in the same light seen a thousand times since.

Coming home from first grade, the first time with petrichor in my nose,

muddy earthworms in my hands, I explored in my own backyard—

the same backyard that now turns plain and dull in my eyes.

Now through the windshield I see again all that is beyond me,

in more ways than one.

There are meteors crashing into the distant forest—

dozens of deer flailing across the road wildly—

all that is the chaotic potential of the universe lies ahead,

and maybe it will ruin me,

but I see the sky ahead catching the light in a new way today, so perhaps it won’t.

But surely this is the beginning of madness, I say to myself,

as I ride down the fading pavement into dirt, through air increasingly nebulous,

but as I carve through it, the air becomes more tame and relaxed.

I become more tame and relaxed.

Yesterday I thought those youthful days of exploration were lost forever,

but now I find that they’ve only fled down the road of life;

they are there between the forest trees in the gaps of darkness—

there in the mind, perhaps fatal, perhaps not—

there behind the fog and down the road—clandestine, unseen.

Short Story by Ethan Naegele, Senior

The Meaning of Love

by Ethan Naegele

Mrs. Horwitz forgot to take her medicine.

The September sun beamed through the large westward windows of her upstairs room. The daylight transformed into its familiar twisted dark gold color of late afternoon, and through the curtains she saw light so beautiful that it enchanted and disintegrated her all at once, because it reminded her of a time when she was younger and prettier out in the park before sunset—younger and prettier and filled with blind passion to live and die in the arms of a charming young man, so elegant and respectable and perfect—younger and prettier. She sat in the white room with the large windows, soaking in the daylight, soaking in the memories of a life so beautiful, so imaginary.

Mrs. Horwitz got that way whenever she forgot to take her medicine. Before long, she’d recall the memories of Dear Old Dad who, when she was fourteen, decided that he wouldn’t have a whore of a daughter and decreed that she was never to leave her room. It was never long after those memories that she’d remember the night when he didn’t come up to her room to make sure she didn’t somehow escape through the bars on the windows like the dirty whore he knew she was. She’d remember how she waited another night to emerge, in order to avoid the risk of being beaten harder than last time, and on that next night she found the corpse with asphyxiated skin tinted light blue, contrasting the cold, black beads of his eyes that stared into infinity. She’d remember asking God for forgiveness—because her tears were anything but mournful.

Those memories tainted her consciousness and prevailed all these years, lightly skating across the edge of perception until the day when Mrs. Horwitz forgot to take her medicine, when they would finally shatter the surface and plunge into her mind and corrupt her every thought.

Mr. Horwitz sat in the kitchen directly below her room. A carefully crafted meal of chicken and peas rested on his plate. The peas were hardly softer than rocks and the chicken was still blood red in the center and still displayed a disheartening rubbery texture. He could hardly complain, though. She spent hours of her life creating this meal, and—since he was not allowed to cook—his lack of choice, and lack of knowledge that there was even a choice, led him to chew and swallow the green rocks and bloody rubber with a mellow smile on his face—pleasantly, ignorantly.

Now and again there were fleeting moments in which a moment of higher consciousness produced a thought that invaded his mind and shattered his ignorance. It only ever lasted for a fraction of a second: a thought not even put into words, no more than a fleeting feeling. Such a feeling invaded him when he wished that he was allowed to leave the house today, but then the perverseness in him settled and replaced itself with a docile, mellow internal smile—as it always did—and as he stood up and looked at their wedding picture, he reminded himself that this is love; this is happy. Never again would he find himself in the dark place where he was always shivering from the cold and crying from the lovelessness, where the sky was always concrete gray so that no gold could ever seep through, because he found love; he found happy.

Upstairs, Mrs. Horwitz now paced back and forth across her room. In her mind, images of her husband alternated with images of her father. The dark gold of the room seemed to strengthen for her eyes only, and upon noticing, that color bombarded her mind and represented all of that which was forever lost in that room, where—between the bars and beyond the branches of the distant trees—she could see those golden rays as they danced into her eyes, and in her mind came a flood of yearning and desire for open fields and freedom, for young love—a feeling to which she could surrender herself completely—for the feeling of human touch, for the twinkling energy of staring into the eyes of another human being.

But those feelings are only idealistic, only idiocies, she told herself. She did not marry a man but an idea, a prevailing idea that told her it was possible to separate the tyrannical nature of the father from the husband. Impossible, she now told herself. Her anger boiled. She reached for the knife under the bed.

Mr. Horwitz had just finished his meal. Standing up, he began to notice the dark gold color that cast itself into brilliance. A vague emptiness swept through him and shook him, but only briefly, like a ship through desolate water momentarily riding upon threatening waves before steadying again. As much as he wished to go to the backyard to witness the transformation of sunset into dusk, he reminded himself that she didn’t allow him there out of love, nothing other than love. She couldn’t function if she was without him, so she had to keep him inside where nothing bad could ever happen to him—inside where he was hers and she was his and they could love each other for all time. He knew that.

It was there. Always there. Always will be there. She tried for a decade now to remove the devil from him, but it remained, prevailed, thrived, even, only ever shifting from his conscious to his subconscious. She had to contain him, tame him, before he strangled her. Had to. If she didn’t, Satan himself would emerge from him and she would only see slivers of gold from between the bars on the windows again. She knew that.

She held the knife behind her back, with both arms crossed behind her, behind her white dress with spots of roses. Mrs. Horwitz was ready, ready to go further than any other time when she forgot to take her medicine, and she walked down the stairs like a bride down the aisle.

Mr. Horwitz heard her soft footsteps. He let the sound of them float in his mind pleasantly. He turned his head slightly and closed his eyes. The woman he loved was coming to join him.

“Let’s go to the yard,” she said.

He never questioned it.

She followed him out the sliding door. He breathed in the enriching air of the emerging September evening, fine and rare. The sunlight on his skin was palpable yet delicate. He closed his eyes and allowed the light to create graceful forms through the lids.

The knife plunged into the side of his neck. It was as if his muscles truly relaxed for the first time in ten years as the weight of his world broke away from him, as if gravity itself had been inverted and allowed everything to float away into the heavens. He collapsed, and the bright red poured onto the unkempt grass.

The devil finally escaped him, she thought. Yet so did the life from the man she could almost love, if it wasn’t for the tyrant within. But he was pure now, cured, released, she realized, so now all that was left was the man without the tyrant; now he was not her father and now she could love him!

So Mrs. Horwitz chased after the man. She knelt down beside her husband. A swift puncture of the carotid artery and she was there with him, following him. She removed the knife from her neck and allowed the divine crimson to pour, and then she collapsed perfectly beside the body, then both faces stared up into infinity. She caught up to him. Her stream coalesced with his, where they met to form a crimson lake that glistened under the dying sun, where their souls had married in everlasting peace.

Short Story by Cora Chavez, Senior

Scary Story

by Cora Chavez

Home is where the heart is supposed to be. I don’t feel love in this house, only fear. My house is not haunted with demons or ghosts, it's forever haunted by my family. Some nights I’m woken up in the middle of the night or maybe it’s more safe to say in the morning, by my younger brother screaming at the top of his lungs. I run to him every time but when I ask him what’s wrong he just stares down with tears in his eyes fumbling with his blanket. He’s never spoken to me about it but I think he dreams that he’s free from this loveless house only to wake up and find that he’s still here.

This house would make anyone scream.

When I get up in the morning to make breakfast I always see my mother in the kitchen but she’s never cooking, she sits in a ball on the dirty tiled floor and rocks back and forth.

Nobody says anything here but me. I’ve grown so used to talking to myself. This place is literally making me insane. Was I already insane to begin with? I can’t leave, I’ve tried so many times the doors and windows won’t open. When I ask my family why they don’t answer. What are they keeping from me? I’m so scared it’s going to be like this forever that I’ll never see any of them smile or hear their laughs.

It was a Tuesday morning when I found myself digging through my mom's drawers out of pure boredom. She was in her room while I was doing it, surprisingly enough she didn’t care! She just laid in bed doing nothing...that’s all most of them ever did. Especially my older little brother, he didn’t play video games anymore he was always under his blankets. I never saw him leave his room. He’d cry a lot. I missed his laugh the most.

My ma had so much stuff in her drawers. I found a bunch of double A batteries, coupons, like 18 quarters and a little tiny stack of papers, probably just old receipts I had thought to myself. I started to unfold them curious about the last things she bought that were worth saving the receipt for.

These weren’t receipts.

I saw my handwriting and I started to scream. I screamed and screamed until my voice was gone. How could I do this to them? I broke them and now I was stuck here forever to watch.

I wasn’t in a haunted house, I was haunting it.

OpEd by Emily Zarate, Senior

A Broken Support System

By Emily Zarate

May 22, 2018

When a bridge lacks support, it is destined to fail. With no structure or base to support it, the bridge will ultimately collapse and no longer maintain its function. Why can’t the same be said of the citizens of this country?

Oh, SNAP!

After twenty years of no reform, it is time we take a look at our nation’s welfare system. As of 2016, more than 44.6 million Americans lived under the poverty line. As strikingly large as this number is, it would have been larger if programs such as Social Security, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and housing subsidies did not exist to lift an additional 48.3 million constituents out of their hardship. Such programs show the benefit of social aid, despite what the Trump administration may claim. As a midterm election nears at the end of this year, it is important to keep in mind that over 13 percent of our nation lives in impoverished conditions everyday.

Poverty rates among the elderly and the disabled are increasingly high due to their physical or mental limitations. Social Security is the most successful social program in American history, however, like all programs throughout American history, there are many—conservatives— who refute it. The lack of funding will significantly decrease the financial protection that many families rely on.

Donald Trump’s—our current president—proposed budget cuts to these federal social programs represent a serious threat to working-class and poor Americans who depend on those programs. Conservatives like Donald Trump, such as Paul Ryan, believe that government social services have only hurt the poor and that Republicans genuinely want to help them by diminishing of their dependence of welfare programs by getting rid of funding. Those in power, have a catastrophic effect on those who mostly depend on the government for assistance. Their role in the lives of others can be their downfall.

Many create an alternative to challenge Trump’s slogan, mentioning that before he can make “America great again” he must first make it humane. The reason for this being that people are forced to live a poor life with limited help. Increased poverty rates are not helped, only making the situation worse. The inhumane treatments caused by conservatives for their entertainment only weakens their support systems. They are given unfair chances to try to remake lives, giving them a “dead end” chance.

The Rich Gets Richer

Identifying the solution for ideal welfare reform, though, comes down to taking a look at the root of the problem. As renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz asserts in his book The Price of Inequality, America currently has the most inequality and least equality of opportunity among developed countries.

Yet, the most disturbing part of the book is the fact that we are very unlikely to follow the advice that is contained in it.

The standard of living of the top 1% continuously rises, while that of the lower 99% continues to fall. Moving money from the bottom to the top lowers consumption because higher income individuals consume a smaller portion of their income than do lower income individuals The opportunities for upward mobility are fewer in the United States than in many other countries. The reason is that the upper 1% have designed the economic, political, tax, and education systems to benefit themselves, to the detriment of everyone else. They do not realize that in the long term, their well-being is inextricably coupled to the well-being of society as a whole.

Against Welfare Programs

On August 22, President Clinton signed into law "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity” Reconciliation Act of 1996, a comprehensive welfare plan that dramatically changed the nation's welfare system into one that requires work in exchange for time-limited assistance. This new system will exclude many of those disabled who are faced with extreme challenges in the workplace. The author mentions that there are many for and against this welfare program. Those against it want to make it tougher to get financial support—such as Arizona giving a one year limit

Although some disapprove of the decreased funding in social welfare programs, there are many who, on the other hand, approve and even encourage it. With various citizens behind them, and many more becoming impoverished, the need for these social reforms increases. As a result, the broken support system negatively affects those who are in most need of it.

OpEd by Xavier Olivia, Senior

A Third-World Within A First -- Rural America in Crisis

By Xavier Oliva May 21, 2018

It was two and a half millennia that the great storyteller Aesop resided in Ancient Greece and told of many tales such as that of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse. The same sentiment of there being disparaging social identities, values between rural and urban are evidently not a new observation, nor do I believe Aesop himself even conjured up the revelation. However, the difference between ever present sectors of culture has--of late--become greater than nuanced opinions. The world views are not different, It is now the world themselves that the American rural population inhabits that differs from their urban counterparts

Ever since World War II, the United States has been the self-proclaimed “greatest country on earth” and has been at the forefront of technological milestones all the way through to present day. To many, it would be a gasp-inducing understatement to deem the United States simply a first-world country, however, through the veil of patriotism and borderline nationalism, it is easy to turn a blind eye to the hardships that American citizens live through on a daily basis. When one thinks of issues that plague society like lack of potable water one conjures up images of Sub-Saharan Africa, war-torn countries halfway around the world, everywhere but our own country. However, to the surprise of many, one needs not travel outside the borders of the United States to even come across a third-world country, they can be found in the rural communities that have been long forsaken.

Foremost, the status of health in these forsaken rural communities is among the most alarming of attributes that liken them to that of developing countries.

Given the privatization of our healthcare system, striving for the highest bidder has left Rural America sick and forgotten. Due to the low population density of these rural communities, it is not cost-effective for there to be a great presence of medical services for those living a far cry from a big city or even a bustling small-town. And with the recent proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act, an act generally beneficial to the poorest of Americans, those in rural areas may be struck with even greater economic burdens and less healthcare options.

In other words, it is not in the best interest of healthcare corporations to help those in need, especially those in rural areas. The statement itself is disgustingly ironic while also being representative of the rural situation surrounding healthcare.

Sadly, the perpetuation of this form of corporatism that seeks to find the only quantifiable success in this capitalistic nation is not limited to just conglomerates.

In western states like California and Colorado, rural communities have been given one more reason to despise big government. Due to rapid population growth in urban hubs and the lack of profitability of agriculture, water has been prioritized in urban areas leading to water transfers from rural areas based on tax revenue. Though water is necessary in these bustling cities, there are unintended consequences, such as the sudden removal of these small agrarian communities’ economic prospects as well as the degradation of said water when in contact with industrial pollutants. And once more the livelihood of Rural America takes a backseat to profits showing once more that human life may just be quantifiable in the form of currency and thus can be prioritized as that, a dollar sign.

However, the greatest issue that plagues the once great heartland of the United States is one that is a nationwide motif, that being drug abuse. With the rise of opioid prescriptions in the 1990s due to the back-breaking labor of both urban industry and rural agriculture, the country’s death toll to the once-unregulated drug has steadily increased to the point of it being impossible not to note by both the general population and the media. And though the problem of drug abuse has been at the forefront of national debate since the early Temperance movements, the urban facet of this plague on society has been given all of the attention with the rural aspect only being acknowledged as recently as this millennium. This urban bias is only made more observed when it is noted that “there were 300 times more seizures of meth labs in Iowa in 1999, for example, than in New York and New Jersey combined. (Egan).

As years have gone by, the heartland of America has quietly regressed to the days of the Dust Bowl, in many cases, as urbanization has pushed the rural lifestyle from being sustainable. It is difficult to tell the outcome of Rural America, however one thing is for sure--history repeats itself and this is just another instance.

OpEd by Karina Delgado, Senior

DDE Literary Magazine

2018-2019

Our mission is to promote and share the creative endeavors of students at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School.

Welcome to Cardinal Voices 2018-19!  We are starting off the school year by featuring OpEd articles written in May by Mrs. McMillan's AP Language and Composition students.  In AP Lang, students learn how to write for a variety of purposes by mastering how to adjust their voice, tone, and strategy. This assignment highlights how these students combine research with their opinion.  All of the featured writers wrote these as juniors and are now seniors.

Environmental racism isn’t a myth.

By: Karina Delgado May 21, 2018

Why is it that when black and brown people voice their concerns on issues that directly pertain to them, officials turn a blind eye? Money. And why is it that minorities have a higher chance of living by a toxic waste dump than whites? Environmental racism.

These two answers go hand in hand.

Racism is as American as cherry pie. It has ran its course over centuries in America. So has capitalism. One cannot corner the market, but one can corner someone’s neighborhood until it is refined to nothing but factory smog and production lines.

Often defined as a toxic set of beliefs that one is superior to another based on race, racism has been systematically implemented through laws afforded by privileged whites. There are no more Jim Crow laws or segregated schools, but racism still persists with each factory placed in a minority-based neighborhood.

The term environmental racism was coined by Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. in a 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christ that examined the location of hazardous waste dumps and found an “insidious form of racism." African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans were, and still are, disproportionately affected by hazardous fumes, environmental policies and dumpsites. They are targeted because companies know they lack resources and knowledge to fight back. This unnecessary intolerance of minorities makes minorities vulnerable in their own homes. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, minorities could feel a sense of safety knowing they would be surrounded by loved ones once in their homes even if the outside world hated them. Now, they have no one to turn to because their loved ones are dead from breathing in toxic fumes from the factory next door.

It is fact that minorities tend to be the ones to live in dangerous neighborhoods—not because they want to, but because they do not have the means to move. The dispute over whether environmental racism is real or not is utterly ridiculous if you think about a rich white family’s decision to live next to a landfill that produces noxious smells.

Surprise, they wouldn’t.

So, what makes companies, who make up studies to take down claims of environmental discrimination, think that their placement of factories in poor neighborhoods is coincidental. Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics want to leave their toxic environments, but they were there first (sounds familiar). And companies know their dilemma which is why they prey on their economic status and inability to fight back.

Flint, Michigan.

A city name anyone in America is all too familiar with. Flint, Michigan first came to the nation’s attention not when its citizens started to become suspicious, but when a revelation over the high lead levels in water surfaced through a Virginia Tech study. City officials decided to switch over Flint’s source of water from Lake Huron to the local Flint River to cut costs. The hopes were to save money; however, instead, an impoverished neighborhood where over 50 percent of residents are African American and 41 percent are poor received toxic waste filtered through their water pipes.

When one citizen decided to see just how toxic her water was, test results revealed that water flowing into her home contained lead levels as high as 397 parts per billion. That level far exceeded the 15 parts per billion (ppb) level at which the EPA requires communities take action, such as replacing lead pipes, to control corrosion and prevent lead from leaching into the water.

How could this have happened? How could America, a revered nation known for leading the way in all kinds of reform, let its government, city and local officials get away with this? The answer lies in negligence. Flint’s mayor had his emails revealed and it showed that he knew there was a problem far before the Virginia Tech study that exposed the city’s lead levels in September of 2015 came out. If he knew then, he could have prevented the genetic link between Flint water and Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia caused by legionella bacteria. During the eighteen months that Flint residents received water from the Flint River, cases of Legionnaires’ disease increased and at least twelve deaths were confirmed in 2017.

America should be ashamed. In this day and age, everyone is entitled to clean water. Mere efforts have been made to fix cities like Flint, though none have made significant impact. Native American communities for years have endured waste dumps on their land. The Environmental Protection Agency has chosen not to do extensive research into why they are chosen or the effects on them later in life. This confirms how little they care about already impoverished neighborhoods once their money is secured. The EPA and Flint officials need to be held responsible for their inability to take action when needed.

Hopefully, now that environmental injustices like Flint have brought awareness to the exploitation of poor communities for financial gain, there can be more action taken to hold those in power accountable for both their actions and inactions.