I miss Tom Basinski. The retired cop turned author used to write a column for The Star-News, “Behind Police Lines,” until his death in 2015.
The stories about life as a beat cop were always good for insight to the law enforcement profession, but dispatches from his boyhood home, Flint, Mich., were the sorts of treats I’d savor as if they were cherry-flavored Lifesavers.
Flint was the place he grew up and started along a path to the seminary until a fork in the road lead him to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps as a cop.
It was also the place that, over time, deteriorated after the auto industry abandoned it and the once thriving blue collar city could not find a way to replenish its economy and keep its infrastructure in tact — when jobs are gone people leave for greener pastures and the tax base shrinks.
As an adult Tom didn’t view his hometown through rose-colored glasses. He knew the prom queen’s best night was long gone, lost somewhere in the tangle of unfulfilled promise and poor decisions.
In talking about the decimated police force there, the shrinking daily newspaper staff and increasing crime, Tom acknowledged that it was hard to watch something he remembered so fondly become almost forgotten and unloved.
But it was still his home and his eyes shined when he talked about going to visit. Reality can muddy the present but it doesn’t darken the sparkle of memories, and that affection for a place can be passed along and shared, even if only for a moment, between two people.
Which is why news of what’s happening in Tom’s hometown is both infuriating and heartbreaking.
Only now is the gravity of Flint’s drinking water catastrophe gaining national attention, even though the city and state government had been providing its citizens with drinking water that is essentially poison.
Only now are the rest of us — who have the good fortune of not living in a city that is rotting from the inside and out —learning that for more than a year mothers have been begging, pleading and complaining to government agencies that something was causing their families’ skins to be covered in rashes or hair to fall out because of contact with municipal water. And that they were dismissed or ignored.
Only now are we learning that, in an effort to save money, the state ended up feeding people in that broken down place water that had significant traces of lead. Yes, water — the stuff of life — may actually end up killing people who trusted their leaders to provide them with a basic necessity. Because they wouldn’t listen.
I miss Tom Basinski. But I’m glad he’s not alive to see what is happening to the place he called home.
