Politicians and the Price of Coal
Apr. 30th, 2007 04:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayYou never know where you're gonna hear this stuff. Yesterday my wife had the day off so, once again, we ended up at the casino. As part of some new togetherness program, apparently, she bought game packs for us to play high stakes bingo. Then she vanished into that smokey hell where slot machines live among the rocks and lure unwary travelers with the mesmerizing call of lights and bells.
In the meantime, the non-smoking part of the bingo hall (another of her touching concessions to our mutual health and well-being) was packed with folks who'd gotten off a tour bus from Pennsylvania, and I was left to set up the game packs. Oh yeah, and two cups of ice water and one of cranberry juice, for when she comes cruising back into the hall at two minutes before starting time.
Anyway, I end up next to these two old boys who grew up near the anthracite (hard coal) mines in Pennsylvania. The father of one of them had actually survived a mine accident, where there'd been multiple fatalities, but had been blinded by the coal dust blown back by the explosion. "Bone and blood are the price of coal," as the folk song says.
Then they talked about being sent to the slag heaps, near the mines, to bring back chunks of anthracite which they then had to reduce to usable sizes on anvils made from discarded pieces of the track that runs into the mine. And they both described the same basic thing. As kids, they'd spend the spring and summer doing this so that by fall there'd be enough coal for their families to heat their houses over the fall and winter.
One of them said that by the time he got done, on any given day, he'd be so black from the coal dust that he'd look like (move over, Imus), "one of them cotton-pickers." And even though they weren't much older than me, one of them had the deficits typical of a stroke victim and the other one's voice and lungs sounded like he'd, well, worked in a coal mine.
Just imagine the effect of such exposures on the body of a child. And the coal companies, which were still turning a profit in those days, fought every step of the way against the very safety and environmental standards that the Bush administration has now spent the past six years incrementally, but systematically, rolling back.
Of course George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of Halliburton's white collar thugs at Pennsylvania Avenue, wouldn't personally know anything about that. Or care. Which is precisely why those bastards have to be shown the door--for destroying lives and futures with their reckless greed--and their policies reversed.
I didn't punish my wife with this diatribe, on the way home, because I knew she'd already lost at the slots...
LPK
LiveJournal
4.30.2007
In the meantime, the non-smoking part of the bingo hall (another of her touching concessions to our mutual health and well-being) was packed with folks who'd gotten off a tour bus from Pennsylvania, and I was left to set up the game packs. Oh yeah, and two cups of ice water and one of cranberry juice, for when she comes cruising back into the hall at two minutes before starting time.
Anyway, I end up next to these two old boys who grew up near the anthracite (hard coal) mines in Pennsylvania. The father of one of them had actually survived a mine accident, where there'd been multiple fatalities, but had been blinded by the coal dust blown back by the explosion. "Bone and blood are the price of coal," as the folk song says.
Then they talked about being sent to the slag heaps, near the mines, to bring back chunks of anthracite which they then had to reduce to usable sizes on anvils made from discarded pieces of the track that runs into the mine. And they both described the same basic thing. As kids, they'd spend the spring and summer doing this so that by fall there'd be enough coal for their families to heat their houses over the fall and winter.
One of them said that by the time he got done, on any given day, he'd be so black from the coal dust that he'd look like (move over, Imus), "one of them cotton-pickers." And even though they weren't much older than me, one of them had the deficits typical of a stroke victim and the other one's voice and lungs sounded like he'd, well, worked in a coal mine.
Just imagine the effect of such exposures on the body of a child. And the coal companies, which were still turning a profit in those days, fought every step of the way against the very safety and environmental standards that the Bush administration has now spent the past six years incrementally, but systematically, rolling back.
Of course George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of Halliburton's white collar thugs at Pennsylvania Avenue, wouldn't personally know anything about that. Or care. Which is precisely why those bastards have to be shown the door--for destroying lives and futures with their reckless greed--and their policies reversed.
I didn't punish my wife with this diatribe, on the way home, because I knew she'd already lost at the slots...
LPK
LiveJournal
4.30.2007
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-03-28 05:14 pm (UTC)