Water, Roads and Education are getting play in today’s newspapers. Households in Detroit are getting shut off from water for nonpayment of bills, the federal highway trust fund is bottoming out, and the Flint, MI public schools has fallen $20 million in debt, emblematic of many urban public schools.

Is it possible that Water, Roads and Education are not basic rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Is it possible that these emergencies don’t keep the monied interests in this country up at night? That they don’t think,”I have so much and some people in this country can’t afford water.” Is it possible that they only drive on well-paved roads or their shock absorbers are so amazing that the potholes don’t register as they drive over them? That they cannot be moved by the overcrowding of public school classrooms, because their children attend schools where the largest class is fifteen students?

Perhaps the rights of individuals have been obscured by the facade of taxation. We can’t allow taxes to pay for what some lazy manipulators have not earned. We’ll give directly to these causes, so the government can’t squander our taxes.  We are charitable people, just not dupes of the undeserving poor.

How is that working out in the land of the free and the home of the brave? “A 90-year-old woman with bedsores and no water available to clean them.” (“Going Without Water in Detroit” N.Y. Times, July 4, 2014). One of the horror stories reported by the Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency, but only one of 904 water customers calling them for assistance in the last year.  Does private charity address the water needs of a thousand people in one city? How can we allow such want in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or are we just free and not brave enough to support these needs with our taxes?

If we were a brave nation, the Flint Public Schools would not be $20 million in debt and the road I drive to my university position would not be fractured with gullies and potholes for the entire twenty years that I have taught there.  The evidence is under our tires and in the erratic attendance of urban secondary school students. The evidence is a family of five “with no water for two weeks who were embarrassed to ask friends if they could bathe at their house (“Going Without Water”). How do we let this happen in the home of the brave?

To be brave is to risk our resources to help those that need them. You can never guarantee that your charity will have the effects you expect, nor can you guarantee that your taxes will be spent wisely. But you can say, “I have enough. Let others use it for a better life.” We do not see this level of bravery in a free land.

Water, Roads and Education. Are these not inalienable rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Or are we only brave enough to provide them for our own kind?