As we just saw, our movie with a message this week is
Erin Brockovich, the true story of the fight for clean water in the small town
of Hinkley, California in 1996. The real Erin Brockovich is still active in the
fight for clean water. She has a new book out called Superman is Not Coming: Our National Water Crisis, and a podcast by
the same name where she interviews everyday people who are working for change in
their communities. In the movie, we see the beginnings of her quest to hold
accountable anyone who endangers human lives for their own profit. A single mom
of three, with a high school education and a no nonsense way of communicating, Erin experienced the pain of classism at every turn in
life. She couldn’t find a job that would pay enough for her to hire a babysitter for her
children and still pay rent and put food on the table. When she was severely
injured in a car accident that wasn’t her fault, and went to court to try to
get a settlement to pay her bills, she ended up being the one put on trial,
because the person who hit her was a respected doctor, and she was portrayed as
just some low-life floozy trying to get money from him. When she finally did
get a job as a file clerk at a law firm, she was snubbed by the other women
there because they didn’t approve of the way she dressed. All of it was
hurtful, but she refused to let other people’s opinions stop her from being
herself, and doing what she knew was right, when she uncovered the deception by
Pacific Gas and Electricity, that was making people in the community of Hinkley
sick. The chromium 6 they used in their pipes to keep them from rusting was
toxic, known to cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. When it seeped into
the ground water in the 1950s, the company kept it a secret. And as we saw in
the clip, when folks began to suspect that the water and the illnesses might be
connected, PG&E sent them to company doctors, who convinced them that they
weren’t. Everybody who underestimated Erin Brockovich really
shouldn’t have. Her desire to make life better for people like her, who
struggled financially, her tenacity, and her amazing brain (dyslexia allowed
her to see patterns when reading, and she had a photographic memory) made her
unstoppable. There’s a great scene I wanted to include a clip of (but I couldn’t
because her language is a bit too colorful,) where the company tries to low
ball them on a settlement, saying that the offer is more than any of ‘these
people’ have ever dreamed of. Brockovich replies, “’These people’ might not be the
most sophisticated people, but they do no how to divide, and what you are
offering isn’t much split, between them. ‘These people’ don’t dream about being
rich. They dream about being able to watch their kids swim in a pool without worrying that they’ll have to have a
hysterectomy at age 20 or have their spine deteriorate. So before you come back
here with another lame offer, I want you to think real hard about what your
spine is worth or what you’d expect someone to pay for your uterus. Then you take out your calculator and multiply that
number by a hundred. Anything less than that is a waste of our time.” Another
theme is the need to work together to make change happen. Erin could
communicate easily with people in this working-class town with her down-to-earth
manner. She was sincere, she had faith in them, and she earned their trust. In
the end, 634 residents signed on to the class action suit against PG&E. And the payout was $333 million dollars, more
than a hundred times their first offer. She still sees herself in that role. She
says in the introduction to her book, “For years, I’ve been teaching one very
simple concept, Superman is not coming to save you. Without water, it is
literally game over for us. The time has come for us to save ourselves. No one
person can fix this. It’s up to all of us. We’ve got to work together.” Of
course this teaching applies to everything that needs changing in our world. It
takes a village to stand up together and speak out against injustice, and it
takes weeks, months, even years of hard work before we can see any progress. I
think the most important thing that the movie and Erin’s work did was to bring to light
the overwhelming prevalence of polluting industries in low income neighborhoods
like Hinkley because they are considered the path of least resistance, since their
residents have less money and less political clout to oppose it. I read a study
that found “a consistent pattern over a 30-year period of placing hazardous
waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live.” In
my own privilege, I didn’t think much about why, when we were remodeling our
home in Decatur, we had to drive 15 miles south to the county landfill. I know why
now. In Flint, Michigan, every elected official and decision maker who chose,
for years, to put toxic water into the bodies of their residents, 45 percent of whom live below the poverty line, should
be held accountable. And, lest we think that the big payout in the movie Erin
Brockovich took care of everything and everyone, the town of Hinkley,
California is still contaminated with chromium 6, 25 years later. The water
board predicts that it will take up to 50 years for 80 percent of the cleanup
to be complete. In the meantime, it is deemed an uninsurable
wasteland. This crisis is just one part of the systemic racism and classism that
define our country. As people who care about justice and equality, we must rise
up to fight for it, no matter how long or how much work it takes. That’s who we
are. So let’s educate ourselves about the problems in our own community that
cause harm and what we can do to help solve them. And then, together, let’s get
to work making it happen.
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