On Mountaintop and Human Decency Removal

After all the reading I did last week and watching the Black Diamond video on Friday, I have formed several opinions regarding not only what is happening to our land, but what we people are doing to each other. I have a lot to say in this blog post, probably more than I can remember to type in this sitting. If any of you reading this has any comments, feel free to mention them in class because maybe we will learn something!

First, after reading all the horrifying tales of coal mining and what the miners have gone through in our nation’s history, I was shocked that we would let something like the UMW miners’ uprising in West Virginia happen. The Civil War should have been a reminder to those oppressing the miners that you cannot treat people, your fellow human beings, so poorly and expect them to accept it for long. I know I wouldn’t. Even I complain about a certain job, working for millionaires for 25 cents above minimum wage after being there for 3 years; but that’s nothing compared to how I felt about men risking their lives underground, not seeing their families, for meager pay and having to spend it at a company-owned store where everything is overpriced! What human oppression. That leads me to the topic of empathy and being considerate as a person, which I will get into in a bit. First, though, I wanted to talk about how I feel about coal mining in general.

I am sure, as Tim/Darrell said in his blog, there must be some way to phase out the disastrous process of mining, just like there was a way to avoid all of it in the first place- not having electricity at all, and not needing all the coal in the first place (only hypothetically speaking of course). As I watched the video, one of the things I thought of is, “look at what we have done to ourselves.” I mean, yes we have great technology and have accomplished very much with it, but at what cost? We are dependent on electricity every day, and therefore we are dependent on coal until we use the same technology to figure out another reliable source of energy (fossil fuels will not be here forever). Even cutting down on electricity would slow the progression of blowing up the mountains, and that is better than nothing.

Now for empathy and being considerate: as a human society, it is hard to label ourselves as a whole. As I was reading our homework on a library computer, I was also eavesdropping on a “California-sounding ‘dude’” with a camouflaged sun visor go on and on about something stupid, and a girl came up to him asking him if he was using his computer (the computers were full at the time, even I had to sweet talk a frozen computer that was vacant to work for me so I could have one too). He said no, and she kept asking, “Are you sure, are you sure?” That is human decency. That is the majority of what I see in my daily life. That is how we treat people in my town. Even if she was thinking, “you stupid loudmouth moron, sitting at the computer not even using it,” she was being considerate and polite. Now, let’s take a company “big wheel”, as my mom calls them, at the top of the company, aiding in the decision to blow somebody’s mountain up to get the precious “black diamonds” that are buried underneath. Is that being considerate? Is that human decency? Is that respect? Being polite?