West Virginia Has Got To Change, Just Like The Rest Of America

by Glenn R. Geist

So the young guy from West Virginia tells the reporter how towns and businesses are dying as coal mining fades away in the 21st century along with most jobs suitable for the uneducated and desperate and those less than pleased to sacrifice health and take big risks to work down in the pits where the sun never shines.

It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mines, as the sad old song goes. A much better place for a robot and automated equipment, but still, coal is the dirtiest of fuels and attempts to build coal fired power plants here in Florida where the air comes off the Atlantic or the gulf and is a pleasure to breathe are usually met with the clicking sounds of rifles and shotguns and republicans jabbering jobsjobsjobs.

Does he think Trump can bring those jobs back? Yes, I do! He says enthusiastically as though Trump had a time machine and the US didn’t have such quantities of natural gas and oil which are cleaner, less dangerous to produce and easier to transport.

Beneath the wishful thinking – the magic thinking I might say that makes people dream this might be 1917 again instead of 2017, where steam trains crossed the continent and you had a coal room and a shovel in your basement and life was very cheap in West Virginia.

You worked from your teenage years until you coughed up your lungs and died, or you died in a cave in or explosion deep in the mines and deep in debt. there never was any other exit.

There was never a future in mining coal and there still isn’t. Unskilled labor isn’t the way to make America great again. Sorry. But beneath the wishful thinking is also the misapprehension that the Government owes us a preservation of things past — like steam engines and coal and horse drawn carriages and family farms.

Trump isn’t going to bring back anything but perhaps obsolescence, poverty and the nasty, brutish and short life of the Industrial Revolution. As a wise old philosopher once said: “whadda you, stupid?” Automation, robots, artificial intelligence along with a demand for healthy air and water and food are the future if we want there to be a future and that future doesn’t include totalitarian liars who attract followers the way spiders attract insects.

Sorry, West Virginia has got to change just like America and the people who live in it. We need to expand education, not shut it down. Teach science not superstition, fables and lies, and for the love of god, if we want to spread prosperity around we have to stop pretending it’s a bad thing. It means we have to put all the Republicans in those deep mine shafts and seal them off.