You know John, wouldn't it be wonderful if we lived in a world where our best understanding of justice was implemented in the minds of all people. If from every corporate boardroom someone said "well, it may not be the most profit maximizing strategy, but in the long run its the right,and moral thing to do". If that were the case we wouldn't be having this conversation. But that's not the world we live in; in this world we have to fight for the right to have clean water, clean air, and a future for our children that doesn't include a decimated planet. When you take a clear unbiased look at carbon fuels, and what the science is clearly telling us; it says we are robbing our children's futures for short sighted gains. The USA has relinquished its role as a leader in new carbon free technologies to pursue a path in carbon extraction that guarantees a risky future. Just like a child grasping for the cartooned, sugar filled, Cocoa puffs; it will take a wise parent leading them to a healthier diet of; tread lightly on our planet, it's the only one we have.
When Halliburton kills a recommendation for transparency in West Virginia's state legislature by state EPA to make public the chemicals it pumps into the ground in it's fracking operations, you feel the boot of power on the neck of our Democracy.
I'll leave it with a statement from Eric Waggoner, a long time West Virginia resident.
Eric Waggoner
Chair, English department, West Virginia Wesleyan College
To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren't followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.
To hell with everyone who ever asked me how I could stand to live in a place like this, so dirty and unhealthy and uneducated. To hell with everyone who ever asked me why people don't just leave, don't just quit (and go to one of the other thousand jobs I suppose you imagine are widely available here), like it never occurred to us, like if only we dumb hilljacks would listen as you explained the safety hazards, we'd all suddenly recognize something that hadn't been on our radar until now.
To hell with the superior attitude one so often encounters in these conversations, and usually from people who have no idea about the complexity and the long history at work in it. To hell with the person I met during my PhD work who, within ten seconds of finding out I was from West Virginia, congratulated me on being able to read. (Stranger, wherever you are today, please know this: Standing in that room full of people, three feet away from you while you smiled at your joke, I very nearly lost control over every civil checkpoint in my body. And though civility was plainly not your native tongue, I did what we have done for generations where I come from, when faced with rude stupidity: I tamped down my first response, and I managed to restrain myself from behaving in a way that would have required a deep cleaning and medical sterilization of the carpet. I did not do any of the things I wanted to. But stranger, please know how badly I wanted to do them.)
And, as long as I'm roundhouse damning everyone, and since my own relatives worked in the coal mines and I can therefore play the Family Card, the one that trumps everything around here: To hell with all of my fellow West Virginians who bought so deeply into the idea of avoidable personal risk and constant sacrifice as an honorable condition under which to live, that they turned that condition into a culture of perverted, twisted pride and self-righteousness, to be celebrated and defended against outsiders. To hell with that insular, xenophobic pathology. To hell with everyone whose only take-away from every story about every explosion, every leak, every mine collapse, is some vague and idiotic vanity in the continued endurance of West Virginians under adverse, sometimes killing circumstances. To hell with everyone everywhere who ever mistook suffering for honor, and who ever taught that to their kids. There's nothing honorable about suffering. Nothing.
To hell with you. This is the one moment in my adult life when I have wished I could still believe in Hell as an actual, physical reality, so that I could imagine you in it.
