Today I was driving back from a doctor’s appointment and was listening to an interview on American Public Radio with a twenty year old coal miner with two young children and a sixty something year old coal miner. They were talking about the coal industry.
The young man has worked in the mines since he was 17 and wants to continue to work in the mines so that he can provide for his family. He voted for Trump because Mr. T promised to rejuvenate the coal industry.
The older guy has worked in the mines all his life. He made a good living, his kids went to school, he lived comfortably. He was diagnosed with black lung in his fifties but couldn’t quit—needed to keep up with payments, and now in his sixties will die of black lung. He voted for Trump as well because he felt like he spoke for the regular man but now he has doubts because it looks like his health insurance is going away and he needs his medicine. He said “…if I was starting over as a young person, if I knew someone who was going in the mines, I would just say run, run.”
I lived with a coal mining family in the 60’s when I was training for Vista. I lived (for a few nights) in the house with another Vista and a Grandma and Grandpa in one room (their front room) and listened to Grandpa cough up his lungs into a coffee can through the night. I wandered in their neighborhoods under the slag heaps. When it rained the run-off was black.
I thought of him as I listened to this story on radio. I cried and then I got angry.
I find liberals as maddening as conservatives. Conservatives want to fuck you and liberals want to judge you for getting fucked. I know, I know. It’s not all conservatives and it’s not all liberals. What I am tired of is the judgy, judgy stuff.
I became really angry at Rob because of what I took to be a rather dismissive critical response to the young man. He couldn’t, perhaps put himself in that young man’s shoes.
This kid was 20, looked 15, has lived in mining country his whole life and sees it as his only option. Is he unschooled? Yes. Is he by nature stupid? Maybe. I don’t know. Can he not imagine a life outside of the one he’s always lived and his father and grandfather before him? No, he cannot.
But nothing will change this kid’s worldview until someone puts the energy, time and money into his future. Help him imagine a different future. Where are the leaders who could do this?
Well, fellas—you have your choice. Energy company execs and conservative politicians who will use you until there is nothing left; or the educated liberals who view you with disdain, making fun of your ignorance, your appearance, your lack of sophistication. If I were you, I’d go with the ones who talk like you do, who seem to have similar values (good old boy Trump), and can offer you employment and a future (seemingly) now. It’s all fake, of course; you are the rubes and they are the ruling class.
What if you’re just a regular Joe? It used to be all right to be a regular Joe. You go to work, you do your job, you tend to your friends and family and your God if you have one and that’s enough.
No children’s books are about lawyers or politicians or real estate tycoons or hedge fund managers. Kids want to be firemen, policemen, teachers, nurses, heavy machinery operators, farmers. Kids want to “do” things.
We romanticize these folks, we call them our heroes, but do we value them? Do we say—thank you for putting food on my table, thank you for milking our cows, thank you for mining the coal that warms our hands and feet on a cold night. No.
We need regular Joes (and Janes for that matter). We can’t all be bankers and brokers, tech geniuses and hedge fund managers. We are so enthralled by vast money and success that we rarely think of the giant pyramid that supports the rich. The carpenters and miners, soldiers and teachers and gardeners and nannies and on and on. Their work makes possible the enormous wealth and prosperity of our country.
Where are our leaders? Where are the people who instead of seeing only the tip of the pyramid, can see the whole beautiful thing each layer resting on the next. Each dependent on the next and so, equally valuable.
When the worm turns and coal is no longer viable, those people, those slag heaps and desperate towns will be abandoned and the money folks will simply move on. No retraining, no health care, no superfund sites, no restoration, no care at all. Do you remember Bhopal where a chemical plant exploded and blinded people in the surrounding communities? Dow threw some money at the problem and left.
Responsibility is a core value. Take responsibility for the harm you’ve done. Clean up your mess.
We need to care for the old man who has destroyed his health warming our homes. We need to care for the young man who sees no other future. Teach him. Show him. Can we help him and others like him develop new skills that would allow him his work ethic and not harm the world? Of course we could.
Will we?
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I pruned my little apple tree in front of the house. What a strange misshapen tree it was when I first acquired it. It was on sale, rejected and dejected.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 