Should we not expect clean drinking water ?

Dear Editor:

What great government doesn’t guarantee clean drinking water?

First of all, let me say thank you to The Weekly Challenger for printing my many rants over all of these years. The first article I wrote about 15 years ago was about a fellow worker named Edward who had been killed in a drive by. Edward was visiting his father and fell asleep on the front porch when some thugs came by and shot up his house.

I was so angry when I went to his funeral and saw his “Positive Black Man” shirt in his casket. That shouldn’t happen to positive black men. The Weekly Challenger not only printed it but placed it on the front page.

So you’ve tolerated my bad grammar for quite some time. I want to also thank the paper for the many articles that have benefited the community for so many years. They even did a great article about how the late “Starman” David Bowie contributed to black music. That’s reflective and contemporary.

Now back to drinking water. So much in the news lately: Jeb Bush and Ben Carson dropped out of the presidential race after spending so much time and $127 million dogging and crabbing out President Obama. Donald Trump continues to make a reality joke out of this race saying things that would have gotten most people dismissed as mad or criminal.

Meanwhile, 10 people in Flint, Mich., have probably died from bad drinking water and the state government has been slow to do anything about it. Flint is largely a black city and Michigan has a republican governor.

So what you say? How about this little nugget? Millions of dollars were spent by the republican run congress to investigate the attack on the Libyan Embassy at Benghazi. Hours of testimony to blame President Obama and Secretary Clinton about the deaths of four diplomats killed by Libyan rioters in a country hostile to the United States since the Reagan era.

Even black actress Stacy Dash blamed President Obama because he wasn’t talking boldly and bad enough. I guess she forgot about Bin Laden. I haven’t heard her say anything about the 10 who died from bad public drinking water in Flint.

Marco Rubio talked about it at a presidential debate in Michigan; he praised the slow acting governor and said nothing about republicans not even asking Governor Rick Snyder to appear at the hearing about the Flint Water Crisis. Rubio said plenty about Donald Trump’s hand size, though. Yes, hand size.

Trump, Cruz and Rubio want to protect the Second Amendment but have said little about the right to clean drinking water. Then again, Flint is mostly a black town.

Notice how they dog out the president. Have you ever heard as much personal disrespect directed at any other president and their family?

How long will black people stay quiet about this racist affront not only to President Obama but black people period?

The Republican Party has not been the party of Lincoln for years. The Civil Rights Movement forced many who had been southern or conservative democrats into the Republican Party. What Richard Nixon started Ronald Reagan completed, as whites that felt threaten by blacks gaining equal rights flock to the Republican Party. The GOP then pushed liberals out.

The election of President Obama energized the far right into the Tea Party because they wanted to take their country back.

Now we have a guy who wants to ban Muslims and build walls to keep Mexicans out. Walls remind me of communist East Berlin. Not America.

President Obama fights terrorist every day while holding a hand out to those in the Middle East who want to work with us. Yet the right calls him weak.

The right says nothing about the many people who die every day from gun violence, other than we need more guns.

They say little about the 10 people who died in Flint, Mich., either. Under republican rule black people have been poisoned by water they are paying for because those republican care more about money than people.

They care more about the right to bear arms than the right to drink clean water the public was paying for.

– Rivers-Cleveland