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      We live in an age when it’s trendy to be a humanitarian do-gooder.  Angelina Jolie receives praise for her volunteer work as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency (but isn’t widely recognized or remembered as a home-wrecker).  Tickets for documentaries highlighting poverty and human rights abuses sell for nine dollars a pop, the ticket-buyer not even flinching at the price.  The end result -- humanitarianism has been trivialized and cheapened into a hollow showpiece, and the American public, while participates in perfunctory ersatz gestures, shows an alarming lack of concern for real problems as close as their own backyard... 

      People are starting to embrace the Kumbyah feelings of summer camp and the 1970s, but still fail to understand that generating change takes more than slapping a political bumper sticker on the back of an SUV.  Don’t misunderstand me—I think that it’s genuinely commendable that many are being educated about the social responsibility we each hold to our world’s (and nation’s) destitute, broken, and abused.  But does anybody else see some contradictions and hypocrisy in the public's current humanitarian attempts?

      We turn on the news and are inundated with accounts of the worst crimes against humanity in history: sex slave trade, genocide, torture, poverty, and starvation.  But amidst this coverage, the media often falls painfully short in covering local problems.  One serious human rights abuse is happening in our own backyard, here in Detroit, but most citizens aren’t even aware of it.  In Detroit, thousands of citizens have had their water shut off because of their inability to pay for water amidst sharply increasing rates.  Likewise, in Highland Park tens of thousands of people have even lost their homes due to the fact that rising water rates are attached to their property taxes.  The irony is this-- the Great Lakes, the largest source of fresh water in our nation, surround Michigan, and yet citizens have still been denied public access to drinking water.

      The basic argument comes down to this: is water a basic human right or a commodity?  The ethics surrounding water privatization have been questioned globally, from Latin America to China and Africa to poor urban areas in the US.  Where is the justice in turning a profit from bottling lake water for distribution across the nation and yet denying local residents access to a state natural resource?  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document created by the United Nations in 1948 in order to protect mankind, states that every human being has the right to those resources which are necessary in sustaining a good quality of life.  Knowing this, I would venture to say that water meets these criteria.  However, my opinion is just one voice, so now it’s my turn to ask you—is water a basic human right or a commodity?

      If your answer is "yes", shun complacency and do something about it. Some modest work has been done already to stave off this worsening crisis.  Approved in July 2006, the Water Affordability Plan was designed to reconnect those residents who didn’t have water and protect them from having such a thing happen again.  But it’s still not enough.  There’s more that we can do at the local and state level.  Here are some suggestions from Diana Seales, the Executive Director of East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC):

1. Hold a showing of the Water Front documentary (a film by Montreal filmmaker Liz Miller taking a look at water privatization through the lens of the water crisis in Highland Park).

2. Hold a discussion about the water shut offs with friends, family, or at public gatherings

3. Go on a tour of the water plant.

4. Talk to your representative about new legislation around water affordability and making it illegal to attach a water bill to your property tax -- remember it could be your house.