Stop Using Flint As Your Ruin-Porn Buffet

Flint, Michigan can’t seem to catch a break. 

This one proud titan city, where some of the brilliant minds that helped birth the automotive industry had lived and worked, was brought low once the factories closed, leaving the city desperate to figure out what next. 

The city had built itself around the automotive industry. So much so, that there was a short-lived amusement park in honor of it. After those jobs left though, the city and its leaders struggled with what to do next. Something many of us have had to face personally. We rely on something always being there and when it’s gone…what do we do?

That was when the decline started for the city and it too decades to finally halt it and to start fighting in earnest against it. That isn’t to say that people weren’t always fighting but it takes time to really understand how deep some wounds are. We are still reeling from COVID-19 and it’s been several years now since its apex.

Since 2014, the city of Flint has seen a massive water crisis, COVID-19, drama with the city council, school closures, corruption, and the hits keep coming. Some wounds have been self-inflicted but others weren’t. 

At the heart of all of it are the people that are there, going through it all. Fighting through it all. 

The prevalence of ruin-porn has become larger and larger as it has become monetized via social platforms and the influx of “citizen journalists” and “documentary crews” has been a part of it. When the water crisis hit there were all manner of wannabe journalists that came here wanting to tell the story. They wanted to scandal, the drama, and the blood. 

And there was plenty to go around. 

They wanted enough juice from the lemon to get some publicity and to make some money for the story, photos, or videos. 

Oh, sure, some really wanted to help, but most of them were just taking advantage of people who felt voiceless and wanted to tell their stories. 

We lived it. 

We went through it. 

It was surreal. 

We had a stack of bottled water in our dining room. 

Even today, eleven years after it started we haven’t gotten resolution to the settlement over the whole thing – though it IS getting closer, it seems. 

There are lots of sad stories in Flint, and they deserve to be told. But to just tell those stories and pretend that’s all there is to the city is a disservice to the place and people, but is also a disservice to the audience. Just like it is to pretend that everything is rosy there. 

Go to ANY city and you can cherry pick the blighted areas and the poorer areas. It’s awful, but that’s part of the landscape of the American dream. Some is generational, some institutional, some is a run of horrific luck, and some of it is just bad choices. 

We see the blight in cities because in small towns we say – oh, that’s just an old farm, when we see a dilapidated barn, overrun land, and a battered home. Or we say someone is eccentric when their house is full of hoarded items from inside to out. We forgive the small towns and rural areas because it’s more spread out. To see concentrated blight is more impactful because it’s all together. It’s not easy to just get rid of though. Someone owns the property and until some sort of imminent domain is pulled, they can do with it as they will. Or won’t. 

Some people just cannot afford to do the basic maintenance to keep things up. 

It happens. 

Sending crews in to speak to people who are stressed, disillusioned, angry, and unheard will always get you views. People love it. Especially with a city like Flint. A “Democratic” city, a city with a lot of lower income, a lot of People of Color, and a lot of bad luck. It allows folks to point and say – yeah, see, that’s why this happened, as they fish for their own bias to put on the city. 

Flint is more than its ruin. 

It is artists who come together to work on murals to beautify the city. 

It is dreamers who pour every dollar they have into a start-up business.

It is foundations serving the people and helping them overcome hardship. 

It is after-school programs to educate and enrich children. 

It is nonprofits fighting to help people be heard and seen. 

It is festivals, and music, and art, and creatives, and business people, and restaurants, and bars, and culture. 

Come to one of the summer festivals in Flint and tell me the city is dead. 

Tell me it’s ruined. 

That doesn’t mean things are perfect, at all. 

It means that people are fighting to make the city better. 

And the city is nothing if not a bunch of fighters. 

Every person in the city of Flint has a story to tell, from the poet looking for love to the lawyer looking for justice to the mother struggling to keep the electricity on in her family’s one-parent home. I am old enough not to believe that the world is fair or just but trying to take advantage of a place and people who had had hardships is just exploitative. 

Flint’s hardships are well cataloged by now. 

How about telling the stories of people fighting to keep the lights on?

Shoot, I did free and inexpensive events in the city for well over ten years because I love the place and the people.

We need to stop using people’s tragedies to make money. 

We need to do better than to go to the hardest hit areas and to speak to a few people and call the story done. 

Yeah, Flint has a lot that’s happened to it but showing just the bad parts is like walking into a movie at the end and telling people you saw the show. 

You saw nothing. 

You learned nothing. 

You know nothing. 

So stop using Flint as your ruin-porn buffet. 

Go create content that changes the world, not that just keeps people ignorant. 

…c…