Some grade school lessons remain in place, long after memory has been overtaken by age. I do not recall which teacher taught or textbook contributed. But I remember the facts as I learned them.
The Roman Empire was built on water, war, and roads. Military innovations of tactics, organization, and technology subdued opposing populations, turning them from hostile adversaries to hostile subjects. Technology made roads possible. Military might made travel on them safe. Roads brought trade and a degree of prosperity, even to those who were subdued.
Water made this empire different from all that had come before. Giant aqueducts were the source, and the new idea of plumbing divided and subdivided the gushing flows into useful streams. Irrigation and cleanliness became a cultural signature. Barbarians were worse than uncivilized. They were dirty.
The water technology that produced that civilization finally helped to bring it down.
Lead was the primary byproduct in refining silver. You’d get a small bit of silver separated from a ton of lead. That’s a lot of dark metal. Finding where to put it had to be a major task.
Somewhere along the line, someone looked into the unique properties of lead. Lead was easy to soften in heat or even to melt. You didn’t need a blast furnace. A campfire would do. You could shape it into useful things.
Like pipes. For running water.
When I was a kid, parts of school were what you might call uninspired. Rote learning had little appeal to me. A classmate came up up with novel ways to get around having to memorize the spelling of common words. George-Eastman’s-Old-Grandmother-Rode-A-Pig-Home-Yesterday is about all I still remember of his technique. To me, it was less tedious simply to sound out how to spell “geography.” Still, entertainment in learning has value.
Science was a little better. But even there, memorization ruled. The periodic table was mostly rote. Most elements were easy. Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen did not tax the memory or bore the synapses. Some atomic symbols were annoyingly unintuitive. I do remember gold making a transition from rote to reason as some wit bestowed upon Barry Goldwater his own molecular formula.
AuH2O.
So gold, Au, began bumping up my score by a point on pop quizzes. Thank you, Senator.
Tin was easy. I had no idea how Sn made onto the table, but it was kind of onomatopoeic. Sn. Snip for tin.
Lead was obvious. Pb – you know – for plumbing.
And, somehow, somewhere, some teacher told me about Pb, about lead poisoning.
The aqueducts helped make Rome an empire. Pipes helped bring it down. Over time, lead made people weak, made people sick, made people die. Plumbing.
Perhaps it was the same voice or textbook that told me about cosmetics in and after the Middle Ages. Aristocratic use of white paint – white lead paint – helped inaugurate social change as those in the top economic strata slowly poisoned themselves and their families.
As Republicans like to say when confronted with science, I’m not a scientist. But, I dimly understand that one reason lead poisons is that the human body cannot tell the difference between it and other metals, metals that are needed. Minuscule amounts of calcium produce wonderful effects in the brain. Intelligence, self control, and overall mental health are somewhat dependent on calcium.
Lead is the great counterfeit. Brain cells glom onto lead as if it’s calcium, and calcium that is useful gets displaced by lead that is not.
I understand there is some scholarly resistance to the contribution of lead to the Roman decline and collapse. The case against lead as a culprit rests on research into what survives of Roman literature. It may have been widely known in ancient times that lead tended to make healthy people less healthy. Lead was used in plumbing, but clay was preferred where practical.
So the phenomenon of lead poisoning is not only well known, it has been well known for a long, long time.
The harm from even tiny amounts of lead is permanent. Children are the most vulnerable to that permanent damage.
That knowledge, knowledge that goes back to ancient times, the knowledge of the dangers of lead, adds a touch of tragic mystery to the poisoning of the children of Flint, Michigan.
As those of us with homes and bank accounts may especially recall, we were hit in the financial head with the frozen boot of a great recession that began the year before Barack Obama became President Obama. A lot of Michigan depends on the auto industry, the same auto industry that almost collapsed into a cosmic black hole. The city of Flint was hit especially hard, and was struggling to pull itself into recovery.
The new Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, had the answer. Just push out local officials and let a conservative former businessman take over. Rick Snyder knew just the man, which is to say himself. He got the legislature to pass a law giving him the authority, then put his own, competent, hard-nosed, conservative people in charge. They reported directly to him.
One of his cost cutting moves was to change the source of drinking water for Flint from the Great Lakes and the Detroit River to the cheaper Flint River. Water from the Flint River is corrosive and tends to eat away the lining of pipes. A lot of underground pipes in Flint had a base of lead surrounded by copper. The corrosion ate enough copper to leach lead into the bodies of unsuspecting men, women, children, and babies in Flint.
It was avoidable. Early corrosion control would have been inexpensive, but someone didn’t think to arrange it. Even if they had, levels of bacteria were toxic and inadequately treated. There were later outbreaks of Legionnaire’s Disease.
Okay, so mistakes, even tragic mistakes, happen. It’s part of life and death.
Documents show that officials soon realized that lives were in danger. And they did act quickly:
By putting out bogus reports and false assurances to the public. Don’t worry, they told anxious parents, the water is completely safe.
What the hell?
It is often hard to fathom what may be in the hearts of others. I suspect a very human, very corrupt, tendency was at work.
Those committed, heart and soul, to an ideology are tempted to embrace and defend that ideology no matter the facts, no matter the cost.
I suspect the Governor and his staff knew, right down to their socks, that their conservative revolution would work. All they needed to do was reassure a panicky public and wait for their policies to take hold.
Upton Sinclair once observed of human frailty, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
What is at stake for these folks is more, much more, than mere salaries. It is a way of looking at the world. It is a governmental philosophy that has gone deep into the soul. It is a political theology, quite impervious to reason, evidence, or the effect on the lives and families of the financially vulnerable.
On the shores of the Great Lakes, near the flow of the Detroit River, even the health and safety of little kids had to be discarded, a sacrifice on the altar of conservative faith.
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