As the conversation continues, Connor gets impassioned with warranted frustration, as he explains the difficulty of everyday tasks that we otherwise take for granted.

“A lot of people are still trying to boil the water, for whatever that’s worth,” he says. “What I personally have to do, since I’ve been here is find a friend that doesn’t stay in Flint, maybe in another community close to us, like Grand Blanc or Beecher, where they are getting water from a completely different source. You might go over to their house to use their shower, but think about that. Think about how inconvenient that is. Then try to brush your teeth using a bottle of water. If brushing your teeth is inconvenient, imagine trying to wash your whole body with a bottle of water. Let’s say you have kids, what are you supposed to do? Pour gallons of water in the tub to bathe one, then drain the tub and do it again for the other? What is the proper procedure to wash yourself with bottled water?”

While countless bottles of water have been delivered to Flint — 6.5 million from Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Nestle alone — Connor insists that this is only a temporary solution to a much more grandiose conundrum.

“This bottled water thing is a Band-Aid for the moment. What is the actual solution? How can we get people to donate money to fix the pipes? What do we have to do to get that to happen? This bottled water thing, how long is that really going to last? And when it’s no longer the hot social trend to talk about and all of these celebrities are not talking about it, the people of Flint are still going to be living this,” he says fervently. “When Flint, Michigan isn’t trending on Twitter anymore, the residents are still going to be going through this. At the end of the day, the people of Flint still have poison water. I don’t care how many bottles of water you donate — and we’re not ungrateful at all — but let’s fix the problem instead of putting a Band-Aid on it. And the people and the children that are already poisoned, what do they do from this point on?”

Solving the problem is where Connor has put most of his energy since his return to Flint. Despite both Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore both calling the crisis a racial issue — citing that because Flint is largely poor and African-American, the problem has been ignored — Connor is less concerned with the politics of the issue and more with fixing the problem.

“I don’t even want to touch it. I don’t want to make it solely about race, because there are white people that live in Flint, there are Hispanics that live in Flint. I think it’s a human issue. I’m not going to get into that. I’m not into this to talk about it to just be a headline. These are human lives,” says Connor. “If this was poison water in an area of all white people, I’d say it’s wrong. If this was populated by all Hispanics, I’d say it’s wrong. I don’t want people to get so deterred and turn it into a race war that we forget that people are dying. I’m an African-American from Flint, MI, so yeah I do feel it. However you feel about the race thing, whatever. Now let’s get back to helping these people. Let’s get back to figuring out how to save these people’s lives.”

Much of Connor’s energy has been poured into both spreading awareness about the situation and donating his time to help out. Last week, he released a song called “Fresh Water For Flint” on SoundCloud, featuring Keke Palmer. The two knocked it out in an hour-and-half, during breaks between Keke’s rehearsals for Grease Live, which aired on Fox this past weekend. “That song wrote itself, I didn’t have to think about what to say,” Connor says of the track.

Connor has teamed with the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan and the Flint Boys & Girls Club to help out as well.

“I first started talking to [Dr.] Dre about this, probably about a month or two ago. He was really, really concerned. He was like ‘How can I help? What can I do to help?’ We wanted to find an organization that whatever we were donating, we knew it was actually going to help the people. The Food Bank of Eastern Michigan was that, because they were helping people get food and water before the crisis,” says Connor. “That’s what they do in general. We’re also helping out at the Flint Boys & Girls Club. Those are organizations that I am in direct contact with, so we know where the help is going.

Jon Connor [center] with the Boys & Girls Club of Flint, MI [photo: Instagram]

“I also went and volunteered my time at the food bank. It doesn’t take much to donate your time. Think about it like this, so much water is being donated to Flint, that they are running out of manpower. They’re sending semis and semis of bottles, but there are only so many people that work at these establishments that they need volunteers,” he says. “I talked to those kids at the Boys & Girls Club, looked them the eyes and told them that it’s going to be okay. It’s one thing to see it on TV, but I wanted to see these little kids. I’m watching these little kids play on stacks of bottled water in their gymnasiums. It’s a harsh reminder that their innocence and their childhood is being affected by this matter.”