I wasn’t planning on writing about infrastructure again this week, but as of March 5, approximately 5,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi, are still without reliably running water. That’s three full weeks without. And this is an improvement from the nearly 50,000 earlier. Jackson city metro only has about 160,000 people.
The situation has dragged on long enough so that friends outside the state have messaged me to ask if I’m okay — a version of “just what’s going on down there?”
On February 27, Angie Thomas, a famous writer originally from Jackson who still lives here, decried the situation on Twitter :
For over 10 days now, around half the residents of Jackson, Mississippi have not had running water. And nobody is talking about it on a national scale. I am begging the national media to please pay attention. There is a crisis happening in Jackson. If you wanna talk to the people who are on the ground, doing the necessary work then I can connect you to them. People are struggling, and since Jackson is majority Black, poor Black folks are getting hit hardest. But NOBODY is talking about it. . . . For those asking why I haven’t connected with national media people I know — I HAVE TRIED. But sometimes it takes a bunch of folks making noise for things to happen.
In the week since, there has been subsequent coverage in The Daily Beast, CNBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Today Show. From my cursory investigations, it looks as if the Today Show coverage specifically was the result of Thomas’s tweets.
Thomas is correct that there has been little media attention given to Mississippi. This whole time I’ve been much more worried about the situation in Texas, because, yes, it seemed quantifiably worse, but also because it was everywhere on the news. The crisis was broadcast, whereas here it just existed.
There is an echo in this lack of coverage with Hurricane Katrina, where there was a well-publicized catastrophe in New Orleans and a much less well-known catastrophe next door on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s a Rodney Dangerfield problem. New Orleans is the more glamorous tourist destination, home of fond memories, better on camera. When it goes, producers reach for the Mardi Gras B-roll. No one knows where Waveland, Mississippi is, relatively speaking.
So an increase in national news coverage to the plight of the state’s ruinous infrastructure is probably a positive occurrence. It certainly can’t make anything worse. But then there is a cynical part of me, a small, persistent voice, beeping like the run-out battery in a household smoke alarm: nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.
Just who is this news being broadcast to? The rest of the country might perhaps be struck with a dagger of sympathy for the situation in Jackson, but they’re not going to actually do anything. Well, that might be incorrect: Thomas sent links to aid organizations and churches who are delivering water to people, so in all actuality that might result in cash in the hands of people dealing with the immediate effects of the crisis. So I’m tripping my cynical alarm too quickly there. But in a slightly more telescoped view, that’s a temporary act of goodwill. Unless those people move to Mississippi, get on the city council, come up with a plan to completely revolutionize the city’s water infrastructure (and hey, come on down! please!), the attention isn’t going to fix the problem.
Is the audience ourselves? By which I mean the people already living in Jackson? Perhaps. And that might make us feel better, feel less alone, feel understood, but this is a symbolic victory rather than a structural one. The city needs physical change. The pipes are literally broken. And that state of decrepitude persists independent of how the citizens feel about how the rest of the country sees them. Positive vibes won’t change the material situation.
Will the national coverage shame our city leaders into effective action? Perhaps. I don’t know. I have a hard time measuring the incentives of shame any longer in this post-Trump era. But the infrastructural problems are so vast and so old that it feels overdetermined to spend one’s energy shaming those currently in office, an easy out for our angst. In reality it’s a shame spread over hundreds of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t fix the problem for decades. Instead of shame perhaps we should pass out bondo and duct tape.
I admit that I have no idea how to fix the problem. I am just observing. I am just typing. I am attempting to describe the situation. I am trying not to complain. I choose to live here. On the one hand it’s good to have more people in the country understand what’s happening and on the other I know that there are people working on the current problem with dedication and diligence. But my point is that it’s a larger problem, one that will outlive this weekend’s news cycle, this weekend’s moment in the jet stream of sympathy. And it’s a problem that needs more than a temporary, emergency fix. Sometimes I think the entire city should just start over. We should recognize that civilized life is simply not viable on this plot of land. The city should pack its bags, leap frog over the suburbs, and start a new city a little further up the highway. Lord knows there’s enough wide open space. We could leave the ruins of the old city as a monument to our century of mistakes. But then, perhaps the leap away has already happened, and the people like me still living in the city are the dupes. The escape, the rebirth, has already happened. Didn’t you hear? We’re living in the ruins already.