I have wanted to write
something about where I’m from and the coal industry for a while. So during a break today from finishing up a short story for release I took the time to do so. I'm not attacking any person by writing this but I would really like to hear from people on what they think about this.
If you don’t
know I’m from a small, what was a coal mining town, in Southwest Virginia
called Appalachia. I grew up with talk of coal right there next to talk of
faith, fishing, and football.
If a kid said the
word scab they might get slapped by their parent because it was one of the
worst things you could let slip from your lips and that leads me to one thing I
really don’t understand and that this defense of coal that people seem to be
riding right now. I respect the coal miners, I respect relatives that died in
mines, I respect the work that my own father did in those mines to support his
family, and the work so many others did for generations but these defense of
coal campaigns… Don’t people understand these are fostered by the very same
coal companies who haven’t cared about the safety or well being of generations
of workers and their families? These very same companies who find people who
need cash and pay them to attend Coal Support rallies in company supplied
t-shirts?
Every job is honorable
to a point to support yourself and your family and is full of admiration but even
as a kid I could not understand this obsession with coal. Then it struck me
once. It’s because of the suffering. The mining companies had so many generations
of workers fucking suffering and dying to feed their families. Coal work where
I’m from it like war in a way. People look at the sacrifices made in the work
with blinders to the point where war is celebrated and not the scarifies made;
so now the industry is celebrated as if it is itself the individual worker.
I know a lot of
people are scared. Hell I’m freaking out daily because I can’t find work, because
I can’t get health issues straightened out. I understand. It’s really
frightening to not have a job or fear losing one, to be able to take care of
your family, but why has this country gone from supporting unions to now
supporting companies? Are we so scared that we are blind to what mountain topping
and fracking is doing to our lands? Are we so scared that we will embrace the
comfortable arms of someone owning our lives?
People are against
Obama for trying to stop some aspects of the coal industry and I see the miner
pissing on Obama images all over the place but I ask you instead- Do you want in
the opposite support people who want to get rid of a lot of the government
regulations and agencies that have keep mining companies from taking advantage
of and in fact killing miners as they did in the past with glee?
But I’m not here to
talk about Obama or Romney or who I think is best. I’ve just had this boiling
in me for a long time to ask people where I’m from and all over for that
matter- Why have we abandoned the individual worker, the united worker, for the
company master?
And all of that
leads me to something that people need to embrace or the lands where I’m from
will slowly degrade after false hope after false hope, compromise after
compromise, to dust that blows away. Places like where I’m from need to move on
from coal. Need to move on from the past and reach out to other industries,
invest in other industries, embrace the modern world in every way they can, and
bring in work and jobs by making it a place of hard working intelligent
excepting people. A place that has always been a beacon of the dirt on your
hands worker fighting for the day to day lives of their families needs to now
become a beacon in other ways.
Or just embrace
fear because it’s more comfortable.
Give in to the
fright of change.
Hold onto old
delusions, philosophies, and prejudices.
Follow like sheep.
But I believe I came
from stronger stock than that.
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