Year: 2014
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National Miner’s Day
Today, coal companies across the nation are “honoring” coal miners. Alpha Natural Resources put up an image of three women coal miners on their Facebook page supporting National Miner’s Day. I posted the following comment which sums up how I feel about coal companies and National Miner’s Day… “If they cared about their coal…
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Laid Off
Over the past few years, we have witnessed an amazing downturn in the coal industry. Mines all throughout Appalachia have closed, leaving thousands of coal miners and their families in dire straits. For as long as the coal industry has existed, the people of Appalachia have lived at the mercy of a boom and bust…
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The Religion of Coal
I usually avoid religion in my posts, but I can no longer ignore how I’ve hearing some folks apply it to coal and coal mining. “If God didn’t want us to use coal, he wouldn’t have put it here!” I’ve heard it a dozen times from friends and family back home.1 It’s even been preached…
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Present Day Coal Mining: Dishonoring our heritage.
Drive into the central Appalachian coalfields and you’ll see dozens of vehicles with stickers such as “Friends of Coal,” “Coal Mining our Future,” “Friends in Low Places” etc. I am not sure when the change came, but sometime in the last fifteen to twenty years, the ultimate goal of coal miners has gone from working…
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“Coal is all we’ve got”
My father told me and my brother on more than one occasion, “I wish I had’ve got you boys more when you were growing up. A lot of the guys at the mine were buying their kids new four-wheelers and things. They got bass boats and campers and took their families to the lake every…
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Reparation
Growing up on down my hollow, coal trucks were a part of life. They rumbled up and down the road every five to ten minutes starting at 6:00 in the morning and continuing until 6:00 in the evening. From our doublewide perched on the hillside, we could hear them coming, jake breaking into each curve…
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Buffalo Creek Disaster – 42 years Later & Still Remembering
Forty-two years ago people were suffering from the terrible loss of their loved ones and all they knew. The reason, a cheaply built slurry impoundment. Coal companies put profit before people. As much as things change, they stay the same. “This was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen in my life, I’m sorry God…
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Going Against the Grain
Many people consider me to be going “against the grain” when it comes to coal politics. I am, after all, very active in social justice these days and have been known to sit in front of buildings, participate in documentaries, testify at public hearings, and even have Op-Eds published in “The Hill.” In various Facebook…