-----Original Message-----
Date: Friday, March 03, 2000 3:54 PM
Subject: Michael Moore Open Letter: Kayla Rowland, Flint, and Us
Michael Moore Open Letter:
Kayla Rowland, Flint, and Us
Dear friends,
I tried to write this letter to you last night, but the level of sadness in
me would not allow me to sit at this keyboard and compose these words. How
much more can my hometown take? How much more do the people we love have to
suffer? How much? How much?? HOW MUCH! Isn't it enough that tens of
thousands of lives in Flint have been wrecked, destroyed by the greed of
General Motors? Isn't it enough that my wife and I and tens of thousands of
others who love our home -- love it more than any of you will ever know --
have had to leave Flint in the past 20 years to find work far from family
and friends? Isn't it enough that Flint suffers the highest or near-highest
per capita rates of murder, rape and theft in the nation?
What else do the people of Flint have to go through while the rest of
country mouths the propaganda of the evening news claiming "the economy is
the best ever!"? The top 10 percent just get richer and richer and the next
30 percent of you keep the CNBC stock ticker on your screens all day and
toss out all sections of the daily paper but the pages that tell you how
well your portfolio did yesterday.
I thought there was nothing else left for Flint to go through. Like Job, it
seemed that every imaginable sorrow had been visited upon its people.
I guess I was wrong.
I look up at the TV and a helicopter is hovering over a school while the
words "Buell Elementary" flash on the screen. Buell? Buell! At the end of
"The Big One," when I twisted Nike chairman Phil Knight's arm to match my
$10,000 contribution to the kids of Flint -- that $20,000 went to Buell
Elementary. Yesterday, a 6-year old boy brought a semi-automatic gun to
that very school in Flint and killed a 6-year old girl in their first grade
classroom. Six years old. A little girl whose name was Kayla Rolland.
That's about the only thing the national media got right about the story.
Twenty satellite trucks now ring the school, but with all that technology,
they cannot find the way to bring you the truth. Of course, they have been
spun and snookered by the local officials in Flint who try to hide from the
responsibility they share in Flint's destruction any time a tragedy like
this happens.
You have probably heard that this school shooting took place out in the
"suburbs," in a place called "Mount Morris Township"... "somewhere near Flint."
There is no such place.
Buell Elementary, where the shooting took place, is in the Flint Beecher
school district, the poorest school district in Genesee County, Michigan,
and perhaps the poorest in the entire state. Eighty-two percent of its
children, according to the federal government, live below the "official"
poverty level (meaning the number of kids in total poverty is even higher).
Beecher is Flint's dump. It is where you go when you have nothing left to
your name. 60 percent black, 40 percent white. No municipality in Genesee
County wants to govern Beecher, so it exists as a No Man's Land on the
northern city limits of Flint. It covers a small portion of two different
townships (one of which is where my wife Kathleen is from). But folks, when
you hear the word "township" used in the case of Beecher, those of us from
Flint mean it in the way the word was used in South Africa.
Buell Elementary in the Flint Beecher school district has a Flint address
and a Flint phone number, but the black officials from Flint on the news
yesterday tried to point out that "this school really isn't in Flint!" It
is amazing how deep oppression takes its roots when even black leaders find
themselves in bed with General Motors and, like Peter in the Garden of
Gethsemane, repeatedly deny that people of their own race have anything to
do with them.
Poor, poor Flint. The media blowhards babble on about how "this is the
youngest child to kill another child in a school shooting" and the few
anchors who started to look at their own helicopter shots showing the
school sitting in the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood commented that
"this is actually the first of all these school shootings we've had lately
that has taken place in an 'urban' school." Wow. Two records for Flint in
one day.
When I was a senior in high school, the assistant principal of Beecher High
-- the first black man in the area to hold such a position -- became
despondent over his inability to quell the racial disturbances in the
school, so one night he went home, wrote a heartfelt letter to the kids in
the district, then put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out. As my
friend, Jeff Gibbs, who went to Beecher, told me last night, it's sad that
the only two times that Beecher receives the attention of the nation is
because of a gun. I heard from relatives last night that the family of the
little boy who killed the girl had been evicted from their home just last
week. Evicted, I wonder, by Deputy Fred, who 10 years after "Roger & Me,"
still spends his day at the behest of Flint's landlords.
Homeless and fatherless (his dad is in jail as 30 percent of all black men
in America will be at some point in their lives), the boy was staying at
his uncle's. In the house were guns, as there are in virtually every home
in this devastated and desperate area. The gun, that the boy found and took
to school, was not some "junk gun," the kind that Al Gore promises to get
rid of. It was a gun with a brand name bought initially at a sporting goods
store (I wonder, were the bullets bought at K-Mart, as they were at
Columbine?).
How do Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush feel this morning? Just seven days prior,
John McCain's "Straight Talk Express" bus rolled past Beecher on I- 75, but
it didn't stop. It rolled on down near Ann Arbor where McCain blasted those
who seek gun control, saying that he opposes ANY ban on ANY assault weapon,
and opposes ANY waiting period for a background check when one purchases a
gun. Mr. Bush never stopped in Flint either. I guess we all feel sorta
proud that they both avoid us like the plague. There is not -- and has not
for nearly thirty years -- been a single Republican state or federal
representative elected from Flint. Another reason, I suppose, for our
neglect and punishment. But we're proud of how we've made it almost a crime
to support a Republican in Flint, proud of the fact we elected the
country's first black mayor in the `60s, proud that we voted for Jesse
Jackson 9 to 1 over Michael Dukakis in 1988 (and 4 to 1 for Jesse in
Flint's all-white suburbs). So I guess the gun crazy presidential
candidates made the right decision to take their hate-filled campaigns
elsewhere.
And, in the end, I was proud to see that the people of Michigan, like the
people in Minnesota, have kept their sense of humor intact as a way to
express their sense of outrage. 51 percent of those who showed up to vote
in the Republican primary were Democrats and Independents! They took the
time to go the polls to plunk down for McCain just to, in good ol' working
class fashion, stick it to the Bush with the silver spoon in his mouth.
I'll end by repeating what I have said many times before -- the handguns
have to go. 16,000 gun murders last year in the US and 15,500 were killed
by someone they knew (husband, boyfriend, neighbor) or by someone at work.
Approximately 500 were killed by a stranger who broke into their home and
300 of those were killed by their OWN gun. Those are the facts. Easy access
to guns by a species that often responds irrationally and with intense
emotions is a lethal combination.
Great Britain, a nation of 60 million people with a violent history of
conquering the world at the barrel of a gun and now full of drunks and
hotheads who eat up violent American movies and TV shows -- last year they
killed a grand total of 12 -- that's TWELVE! -- of their own citizens with
handguns. That's because handguns are TOTALLY banned. Let the hunters keep
their rifles after a serious background check, but the handguns, whose only
purpose is to take a human life, must go. The Brits have done it, the
Australians have done it, the Canadians have done it. Even New York City
mostly did it -- and the number of murders there has dropped from 2,200 a
year to 600.
We look like a bunch of idiots. Let's do something about it and about the
poverty in which so many of kids still dwell. We have never been in a
better place to make it happen than right now. What are we waiting for?
Another Kayla Rolland? God help you if you ever have to live in a township
that no town will claim and is forgotten by everyone else as soon as the
next gun nut enters a McDonald's and a Burger king on the same day. Fried
or flame-broiled, it's all our own unique American Hell. On behalf of the
six of us from Flint who work on The Awful Truth,
Michael Moore
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. If you would like to contribute to the Kayla Rolland Memorial Fund
please send donations to:
Kayla Rolland Memorial Fund
c/o Calvary Assembly of God
2518 Delaware Avenue
Flint, MI 48506, USA
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