Being a Flint PD officer and a factory worker in the town where I grew up, this program had special meeting for me. That cat-walk into the entrance of the Flint Police Department was exactly the same in the early 60's. Only far fewer travel there now.
Fate had me leaving a generation before everybody else. Going back now, visually, is frightening and enraging.
Flint is a 3rd World city in a First World Country. As was shown again and again, from the local perspective, nobody else even cares about their suffering. Maybe, this raw and accurate depiction of Flint could finally become a wake-up call.
Flint has always been a blue-collar down. It was the American Dream for all the South. The mass poverty starting with the Depression, found thousands of Southerners migrating to "the shops in Michigan," and the Flint Automobile Industry hired them all, including my dad.
We, whose dads were called "shop rats," had a good life, with much diversity before it became a cultural catch-phrase. Something that probably will never be given enough credit, Flint was partly responsible for Southern blacks and whites being forced to work together on the assembly lines--and out of that, came mutual respect, understanding, and a bit more tolerance and less bigotry.
Now all that's gone, and Flint Town shows how and why. Can it be fixed? A hundred thousand blameless souls sure hope so.
