The Back Row, Phone Tag, and Bottled Water

Have you ever played government agency phone tag?

When the Environmental Protection Agency told the residents of Benton Harbor to stop drinking their tap water last October, this game enveloped residents, even more than it already had.

It’s one my coworker Louise, who has been covering the aging lead infrastructure in Benton Harbor long before it was cool enough for national reporters to parachute in, had been playing as a reporter for years.

Call the city about a policy and they refer you to the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. Call EGLE, and they refer you to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Call MDHHS, and they refer you to the local county health department.

Inevitably, the health department says that you really should be calling the city, and the cycle starts over. 

Given the scope of the crisis, I’ve covered a few stories where Louise could not and have had no better luck winning phone tag.

But the stakes are far lower when I play, and that came into clear focus last fall when my editor passed along a voicemail from a resident. 

The woman, who had lived in Benton Harbor long enough to see the banks move out after the first Black mayor was elected, was on the losing end of a game of phone tag, and the four children living with her did not have clean water to drink.

Yes, there were several water delivery sites in the city, but their household didn’t own a car, and her husband was in his seventies. 

She called the numbers the local TV station had broadcasted for residents to call for water delivery, and each number passed her on to the next number, putting her on hold until the dial tone rang, and she had to start from scratch once more.

To hold her household over, she had the kids walk over to the corner store and buy gallon jugs of water. 

When you need it to drink, cook, and brush your teeth with, a gallon doesn’t last long. When everyone else in the neighborhood needs those jugs too, and the line for free water bottle distribution is dozens—if not hundreds—of cars deep, the price for those gallon jugs isn’t cheap.

As a last resort, she called my newspaper, so I made those calls for her again, largely with the same results. 

No party was responsible; it’s easier to wash your hands of a crisis when you don’t have to use bottled water.

There’s a journalist/blogger/photographer I follow who documents what he dubs “back row America.” (Read this.)

His name is Chris Arnade, and after working on Wall Street for years, an existential crisis and the 2008 financial crisis pushed him to travel the country, meeting those his industry had left behind.

Arnade toys a lot with the distinction of back row and front row America. The writers and nearly all of the audience of the post calvin belong to the front row. With college degrees and professional jobs, we rarely are in situations where we have to play phone tag. If we do, we operate with comfortable distance between us and lead poisoning, the kind of distance that allows you to play phone tag with annoyance and not desperation.

When my disabled brother aged out of the public school system, my family joined the game. My mom had to (but was able to) retire from teaching to focus on getting him care.

It was hard. Illinois is a state with everything going for it except its government, which is actively going against it. My mom had to claw for every benefit he was owed (to her great credit). 

Still, my family was never in the desperate straits that some of his classmates’ families were in, and far, far from where this Benton Harbor resident was.

I wrote a story about this woman, and while I was writing it, the lieutenant governor announced that bottled water would be delivered to houses the next day. When I went door-to-door to interview residents a week or so later, sure enough, the abandoned houses still had their 24-pack of Nestle water bottles sitting on their stoop.

In the game of phone tag, the front row dangles the answers, the services and the bottled water, always holding the authority but never the responsibility for the back row clamoring below. 

That’s why when we play, we’re at ease, never straining, only firing off 280 characters about our frustration, feigning sympathy for those “who really need the help.”

The conservative circles I grew up in (and still call home) only very recently have learned to speak about these people (and do so usually cynically). From where I sit, the professional (often liberal) circles I participate in do so with good intentions, but performatively. 

Like Arnade, we say: 

I considered myself open-minded, considerate, and reflective about my privilege. I read three ­papers daily, I watched documentaries on our social problems, and I voted for and supported policies that I felt recognized and addressed my privilege. I gave money and time to charities that focused on ­poverty and injustice. I understood that I was ­selfish, but I rationalized. Aren’t we all selfish? ­Besides, I am far less selfish than others. Look at how I vote (­progressive), what I believe in (equality), and who my colleagues are (people of all races from all ­places).

The back row plays phone tag with stakes. The front debates phone tag, exasperated at their brief encounters with a system they have built and satisfied to see fail others.