We've got the courage. We've got the heart. We've got the brain. Here we are. We the people now we need to activate that again and I guarantee you we're going to find our way back.

Hey everybody, this is Mary Ann Williamson and welcome to today's podcast and our conversations about things that matter. Today's conversation matters a lot because it has to do with the water. The water that we drink, the water that we bathe in.

The water that we and our children swim in. Obviously we want to care about the oceans. We want to care about all the waters of the world. But this has to do with a very specific water crisis here in the United States today.

I know if you're old enough, you probably saw the movie Aaron Brockovich that came out 20 years ago now. If you have not seen the movie, I suggest that you run and see it.

It was a great film directed by Steven Sotterberg and Julia Roberts won a very well-deserved Oscar for Best Actress that year. Playing a very real character, a character that you were going to meet shortly named Aaron Brockovich.

And the story of what happened in Hinkley, California when in 1996 PG&E had to pay $333 million the largest settlement ever to over 600 plaintiffs who had been poisoned by Chromium 6 in their water.

Now, we all saw that movie, yay, Aaron Brockovich. We all love the stories of the heroes that stand up to the big corporate polluters, the big corporate forces that make it difficult, that make people sick, that hurt people in their workplace or whatever.

But I think that there's also an awakening to the fact that this is not just about a single case here or a single case there.

This is about the corruption of our entire system, our entire governmental system, our entire political system, and our entire society, whereby the short-term profits of huge multinational corporate entities are often, in fact more often than not, placed before the safety and the health and the well-being of our people.

Now, on the topic of water specifically, good news and bad news, Aaron Brockovich has a new book out, that's good.

Superman's not coming, our national water crisis, and what we the people can do about it. Here's the story. It's not like, oh, this is great, what happened in Hinkley, and they got the PG&E to pay, and then you like to think, oh, so now all these companies have learned that they better not act like this anymore.

What Aaron Brockovich says in this book, that's quite disconcerting, is that the problem has only grown exponentially over the last 20 years.

As a matter of fact, you know, a lot of the, even when settlements are charged, you could, you know, on another topic, you could see this about Purdue.

The slacker family, Purdue Pharma, a big pharmaceutical company, so the fact that we've had over 400,000 opioid drug overdoses that could be traced to predatory behavior on the part of big pharmaceutical company executives.

Well, we see these big multi-billion dollar settlements, but we have come to realize that what you and I see is gargantuan amounts of money is sometimes to some of these people and to some of these corporate forces, just kind of like, you know, lunch money.

It's not enough to really make a difference. It's just the cost of doing business. And we're living at a time where there's what's called agency capture, whereas in this last administration, there were people put in the head of these agencies.

Who actually represented the very corporate forces that the agency was set up to protect us from when they were seeking to overreach for financial gain.

Hopefully some of that will be changing in a very fundamental way soon, but one of the things Aaron Brockovich makes clear is that this is not simple.

This is complicated and none of it's going to fundamentally change until you and I do. It's not going to fundamentally change until there's a rebirth of citizenship.

There's not going to be a new birth of freedom in the United States if there's not a new birth of citizenship among all of us.

So much of what has happened has been because we took our eye off the ball.

The very title of Aaron's book, Superman's Not Coming means there's nobody out there that's going to save us from this.

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