This is from Michael Moore whose films about Flint Michigan showed a
side of America not often seen.
Ken Goodman
attached mail follows:
,
FYI, comments about the recent shooting and the schools in which it
occurred from Michael Moore, producer of the movie Roger & Me and the tv
show, TV Nation.
Gerry
=============
> >> Date: 01-Mar-00 19:12:19 MsgID: MC2-9B6F-210E ToID: 72763,2240
>From: "Michael Moore's newsletter" >INTERNET:MICHAELMOORE@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
>Subj: Flint, Again -- A message from Michael Moore
>Chrg: $0.00 Imp: Norm Sens: Std Receipt: No Parts: 1
>
>
>03.01.00
>
>Dear friends,
>
>I tried to write this letter to you last night, but the level of
>sadness in me would not allow me to sit at this keyboard
>and compose these words.
>
>How much more can my hometown take? How much more
>do the people we love have to suffer? How much? How
>much?? HOW MUCH!
>
>Isn't it enough that tens of thousands of lives in Flint have
>been wrecked, destroyed by the greed of General Motors?
>Isn't it enough that my wife and I and tens of thousands of
>others who love our home -- love it more than any of you
>will ever know -- have had to leave Flint in the past 20 years
>to find work far from family and friends? Isn't it enough
>that Flint suffers the highest or near-highest per capita rates
>of murder, rape and theft in the nation?
>
>What else do the people of Flint have to go through while
>the rest of country mouths the propaganda of the evening
>news claiming "the economy is the best ever!"? The top 10
>percent just get richer and richer and the next 30 percent of
>you keep the CNBC stock ticker on your screens all day
>and toss out all sections of the daily paper but the pages
>that tell you how well your portfolio did yesterday.
>
>I thought there was nothing else left for Flint to go through.
>Like Job, it seemed that every imaginable sorrow had been
>visited upon its people. I guess I was wrong.
>
>I look up at the TV and a helicopter is hovering over a
>school while the words "Buell Elementary" flash on the
>screen.
>
>Buell? Buell! At the end of "The Big One," when I twisted
>Nike chairman Phil Knight's arm to match my $10,000
>contribution to the kids of Flint -- that $20,000 went to
>Buell Elementary.
>
>Yesterday, a 6-year old boy brought a semi-automatic gun
>to that very school in Flint and killed a 6-year old girl in
>their first grade classroom.
>
>Six years old.
>
>A little girl whose name was Kayla Rolland.
>
>That's about the only thing the national media got right
>about the story. Twenty satellite trucks now ring the school,
>but with all that technology, they cannot find the way to
>bring you the truth. Of course, they have been spun and
>snookered by the local officials in Flint who try to hide
>from the responsibility they share in Flint's destruction any
>time a tragedy like this happens.
>
>You have probably heard that this school shooting took
>place out in the "suburbs," in a place called "Mount Morris
>Township"... "somewhere near Flint."
>
>There is no such place.
>
>Buell Elementary, where the shooting took place, is in the
>Flint Beecher school district, the poorest school district in
>Genesee County, Michigan, and perhaps the poorest in the
>entire state. Eighty-two percent of its children, according to
>the federal government, live below the "official" poverty
>level (meaning the number of kids in total poverty is even
>higher).
>
>Beecher is Flint's dump. It is where you go when you have
>nothing left to your name. 60 percent black, 40 percent
>white. No municipality in Genesee County wants to govern
>Beecher, so it exists as a No Man's Land on the northern
>city limits of Flint. It covers a small portion of two different
>townships (one of which is where my wife Kathleen is
>from). But folks, when you hear the word "township" used
>in the case of Beecher, those of us from Flint mean it in the
>way the word was used in South Africa. Buell Elementary
>in the Flint Beecher school district has a Flint address and a
>Flint phone number, but the black officials from Flint on
>the news yesterday tried to point out that "this school really
>isn't in Flint!" It is amazing how deep oppression takes its
>roots when even black leaders find themselves in bed with
>General Motors and, like Peter in the Garden of
>Gethsemane, repeatedly deny that people of their own race
>have anything to do with them.
>
>Poor, poor Flint. The media blowhards babble on about
>how "this is the youngest child to kill another child in a
>school shooting" and the few anchors who started to look
>at their own helicopter shots showing the school sitting in
>the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood commented that
>"this is actually the first of all these school shootings we've
>had lately that has taken place in an 'urban' school." Wow.
>Two records for Flint in one day.
>
>When I was a senior in high school, the assistant principal
>of Beecher High -- the first black man in the area to hold
>such a position -- became despondent over his inability to
>quell the racial disturbances in the school, so one night he
>went home, wrote a heartfelt letter to the kids in the district,
>then put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out. As my
>friend, Jeff Gibbs, who went to Beecher, told me last night,
>it's sad that the only two times that Beecher receives the
>attention of the nation is because of a gun. (Jeff's letter to
>me can be read in full by going to
>http://www.michaelmoore.com/jgibbs.html).
>
>I heard from relatives last night that the family of the little
>boy who killed the girl had been evicted from their home
>just last week. Evicted, I wonder, by Deputy Fred, who 10
>years after "Roger & Me," still spends his day at the behest
>of Flint's landlords.
>
>Homeless and fatherless (his dad is in jail as 30 percent of
>all black men in America will be at some point in their
>lives), the boy was staying at his uncle's. In the house were
>guns, as there are in virtually every home in this devastated
>and desperate area. The gun, that the boy found and took to
>school, was not some "junk gun," the kind that Al Gore
>promises to get rid of. It was a gun with a brand name
>bought initially at a sporting goods store (I wonder, were
>the bullets bought at K-Mart, as they were at Columbine?).
>
>How do Mr. McCain and Mr. Bush feel this morning? Just
>seven days prior, John McCain's "Straight Talk Express"
>bus rolled past Beecher on I-75, but it didn't stop. It rolled
>on down near Ann Arbor where McCain blasted those who
>seek gun control, saying that he opposes ANY ban on ANY
>assault weapon, and opposes ANY waiting period for a
>background check when one purchases a gun. Mr. Bush
>never stopped in Flint either.
>
>I guess we all feel sorta proud that they both avoid us like
>the plague. There is not -- and has not for nearly thirty
>years -- been a single Republican state or federal
>representative elected from Flint. Another reason, I
>suppose, for our neglect and punishment. But we're proud
>of how we've made it almost a crime to support a
>Republican in Flint, proud of the fact we elected the
>country's first black mayor in the '60s, proud that we voted
>for Jesse Jackson 9 to 1 over Michael Dukakis in 1988
>(and 4 to 1 for Jesse in Flint's all-white suburbs). So I
>guess the gun crazy presidential candidates made the right
>decision to take their hate-filled campaigns elsewhere. And,
>in the end, I was proud to see that the people of Michigan,
>like the people in Minnesota, have kept their sense of
>humor intact as a way to express their sense of outrage. 51
>percent of those who showed up to vote in the Republican
>primary were Democrats and Independents! They took the
>time to go the polls to plunk down for McCain just to, in
>good ol' working class fashion, stick it to the Bush with the
>silver spoon in his mouth.
>
>I'll end by repeating what I have said many times before --
>the handguns have to go. 16,000 gun murders last year in
>the US and 15,500 were killed by someone they knew
>(husband, boyfriend, neighbor) or by someone at work.
>Approximately 500 were killed by a stranger who broke
>into their home and 300 of those were killed by their OWN
>gun. Those are the facts. Easy access to guns by a species
>that often responds irrationally and with intense emotions is
>a lethal combination. Great Britain, a nation of 60 million
>people with a violent history of conquering the world at the
>barrel of a gun and now full of drunks and hotheads who
>eat up violent American movies and TV shows -- last year
>they killed a grand total of 12 -- that's TWELVE! -- of their
>own citizens with handguns. That's because handguns are
>TOTALLY banned. Let the hunters keep their rifles after a
>serious background check, but the handguns, whose only
>purpose is to take a human life, must go. The Brits have
>done it, the Australians have done it, the Canadians have
>done it. Even New York City mostly did it -- and the
>number of murders there has dropped from 2,200 a year to
>600.
>
>We look like a bunch of idiots. Let's do something about it
>and about the poverty in which so many kids still dwell.
>We have never been in a better place to make it happen than
>right now.
>
>What are we waiting for? Another Kayla Rolland? God
>help you if you ever have to live in a township that no town
>will claim and is forgotten by everyone else as soon as the
>next gun nut enters a McDonald's and a Burger king on the
>same day. Fried or flame-broiled, it's all our own unique
>American Hell.
>
>On behalf of the six of us from Flint who work on The
>Awful Truth,
>Michael Moore
>
>MMFlint@aol.com
>http://www.michaelmoore.com/
>
>P.S. -- If you would like to contribute to the Kayla Rolland
>Memorial Fund please send donations to:
>Kayla Rolland Memorial Fund,
>c/o Calvary Assembley of God
>2518 Delaware Avenue
>Flint, MI 48506
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 09:20:32 PDT