At the start of her pediatric medicine career, Mona Hanna-Attisha, like all doctors, took the Hippocratic Oath, the main tenet of which is to “do no harm.” When Mona became aware of the fact that Flint’s water supply was tainted with massive amounts of toxic lead, she realized that Flint’s local and state governments had failed to uphold community values—despite being the representatives of Flint’s community. In response, Mona and her colleagues stepped up and showed care, unity, and advocacy. With this, What the Eyes Don’t See suggests that a commitment to upholding values of solidarity, support, and justice is the duty of all members of any given community.
Flint is home to many residents who are low-income and/or Black—which means they’re often stripped of the resources they need to make their voices heard by those in power. At the start of the water crisis, Flint—a city with a long history of anti-Black racism—was under the control of a local government that wasn’t serving it. An emergency manager had been called in to cut costs, resulting in the switch from a Detroit water source to the Flint River. But the new water source wasn’t treated properly, and so it began leaching lead from old pipes into people’s drinking water. Officials knew there was lead in the water, but they did nothing to rectify the damage that was being done to Flint’s residents with every sip of water they were taking. Flint wasn’t a community that its government felt was “worth going out on a limb for.”
Collective, community-focused action from relatively privileged people like Mona was especially necessary after the government failed to provide the support Flint needed. Mona saw that, in spite of local residents’ complaints about water that was brown, cloudy, or smelly, the government wasn’t doing anything to address their concerns. So, Mona realized that if she wanted there to be change in her community, it would have to start with her and a group of like-minded colleagues, friends, and supporters. As a doctor, she felt she had an even larger duty to protect the health of Flint’s residents—after all, she’d taken an oath early on in her career to “do no harm.” No one else was going to stand up or speak out on behalf of Flint, so Mona took matters into her own hands.
When Mona realized what was happening in her city, she realized that she and her colleagues had an opportunity to show up for their community by pressuring the government to uphold its duty to Flint. “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. […] Where had we been? Where had I been?” Mona asks herself early on in What the Eyes Don’t See. When she realized that there was a water crisis in Flint—meaning that toxic levels of lead were leaching into the water that her young, vulnerable patients were drinking each day—she looked inward and realized that she and her colleagues had not been the advocates their patients needed. Rather than despair or blame herself, Mona got right to work investigating the water-source switch that caused the crisis and how her patients’ blood-lead levels had been affected since. She was determined to become the advocate her patients needed—a doctor who would work tirelessly to ensure that they were safe, healthy, and protected. Mona’s team made a show of collective resistance and solidarity with their community. They knew that the low-income, Black residents of Flint who were suffering most under the water crisis would face more backlash and discrimination than a group of medical professionals. So Mona and her team presented a united front, illustrating their dedication to protecting their patients no matter the cost.
In the end, Mona and her colleagues were able to help their community make its message heard around the world, illustrating the impact that community values and support can have. Mona and her team worked together to produce data that would prove the danger of what was happening in Flint—and when their local government officials wouldn’t support them, they struck out on their own and brought their data to the public. Because Mona and her team stood tall in the face of state and city officials’ attempts to discredit their research and continue covering up the crisis, they were eventually able to force local officials to admit that there was lead in Flint’s water. Shortly after Mona and her team came forward, Flint’s water source was switched back to the Detroit river. In the months and years that followed, many officials who played a part in covering up the crisis were removed from their posts and charged with involuntary manslaughter and other crimes against Flints’ residents. Mona’s story shows that it’s possible for anyone to make a difference in their community through solidarity and a commitment to uplifting those who’ve been held back from advocating for themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Community Values and Collective Duty ThemeTracker
Community Values and Collective Duty Quotes in What the Eyes Don’t See
There’s an expression I have always liked, a D. H. Lawrence distillation: The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.
“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.
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.
“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.”
