Political Film And Fiction

9 Pages 2156 Words

lives on the island.
In Roger and Me, Michael Moore takes the viewer on a quest to have the CEO of General Motors Roger Smith come to Flint, Michigan for a day. He wants Smith to come and see how Flint once a proud booming city has fallen to a city in disrepair. It was Smith’s idea to close the GM plant in Flint in order to make a little more money in the long run. The GM plant primarily employed the city of Flint and once it closed the people had no other way of earning a living. GM was already making a profit but decided that they could make more of a profit by doing a few different business ventures. This crushed the city of Flint and it never recovered. Unemployment went through the roof and that led to a rise in crime as well. Most of the families of Flint were forced to become minimalists in order to just barely survive.
Thoreau warned us to be careful of wanting in excess. He argued that as people we were building our expectations too high. George Smith built his expectations very high and those expectations were so high that they destroyed a whole town and tens of thousands of lives. General Motors and George Smith are perfect examples of what happens when a person feels as though he can never have enough in his lifetime. I think that in the course of George Smiths life he learned that his only job was to make GM as much money as he possibly could. Without Government intervention the city of Flint faced economic hardships and soc...