The trouble with inept government action as this is that it is hard to determine the real perpetrator. There’s a whole bunch of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance that allows people from up and down the hierarchy to believe that someone else is supposed to solve the problem.

Here’s the troubling part about this essay.

The number of people who continue to be affected is staggering. Most of them are poor. Most of them are Black. That matters.

It’s kind of hard to imagine an affluent community allowing this to happen to their water treatment system. And if it did, it would have been fixed a long time ago. But disenfranchised communities don’t have the political clout.

And I recall seeing a documentary on how a few citizens brought this disaster to national attention. Yet, according to this article, the problem is still not fixed.

To me, this is another sign of why we need to change our system of governance.