I’ll put my nose wherever I want, this is a “free” country. I will especially put it where I find irresponsible plunderers like your husband. Why should all of us have to suffer because your husband wants to work in the coal industry? Why should other people’s children have to get sick, and in some cases die, so that you husband can help blow up a mountain?

Are you telling me the ONLY thing you and your husband can do to “make a living” is mine coal? Ridiculous. This “providing for their families” line is the same bull I hear about whalers, sealers, lumberjacks… you name it. I despise this justification of exploitation. If you can’t provide for a family any other way then perhaps you shouldn’t have had a family, but you probably never considered that did you? I’m tired of people’s flagrant irresponsibility, and I have no more sympathy for you.

My sympathy is reserved for people who’ve had their homes and land destroyed by the slurry dam failure in Tennessee. My sympathy is for kids who have to go to school in the shadow of a damn just like it. My sympathy is for the thousands of Americans who die every year because of the coal industry: the old, the young, and the unlucky. My sympathy is for the unique and brilliant beauty of the Appalachian mountains and the life it supports which is being irreversibly destroyed by people like your husband.

Someday people will realize that allowing others to exploit and destroy the planet is the most offensive crime you can commit. But for now I have to put up with people like you, who believe it is somehow noble…

As for Obama – you should love him. He supports big coal, especially coal mining in Appalachia.

This is not an issue of outsiders against WV miners. You can keep on saying that until you go blue in the face, folks. And asking if we have ever seen a reclaim is also silly. Yes, I have seen MANY, and I have looked through the permits and evacuation plans and been on the major slurry impoundments in this area, as well as talked with the mine inspectors, MSHA, DEP, and many local residents who have lost their water, had their foundation of their homes destroyed, are choked by dust after blasting, or who have children who are quite literally scared at night when it rains. I AM A WEST VIRGINIAN and I come from coal mining and my family does not support MTR in any way. Now, tell me, why can’t we work together to provide jobs in this area instead of attacking each other in the name of Massey? Instead of telling us to go home (and ignoring the people who live here and pretending that everyone here is pro MTR, which is an outright lie) why don’t you go door to door and visit your own neighbors who are suffering and scared? or do you have to believe that those people don’t exist and that this movement is all outsiders? Please address this question. If your water and land are fine, then thank God, but that does not mean that everyone else is fine. Go and see for yourself, and if you would like, tell me where to go see a reclaimed mine site with the “habitat restored” and then perhaps we can have a productive conversation. I spent over a year traveling around to these reclaimed sites. How much time have you spent sitting with West Virginian families who feel that your husband’s job is taking away a good life for THEIR children? Are you going to direct all of this hateful defensive “coal is WV” crap at them?

http://www.wvablue.com/diary/4681/responsibly-ending-mountain-top-removal

Points out that even in WV, public opinion is about 66% against MTR. The only people truly for MTR are the greed-sick executives who take home the profit.

Adam Smith, the “Father of Economics,” said: “The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.”

Come to the coalfields, and see which of these “states,” after over 150 years of timber, natural gas and coal extraction, describes the region the best. I’m gonna go with melancholy.