A Lesson To Ralph Stanley

I was broken-hearted when I saw this ad for the first time in the Fall of 2008. A regional legend by the name of Ralph Stanley, bluegrass hero to millions of us from the Appalachian Mountains and beyond, actually endorsed Obama for president. If you know anything about the coal-mining territory in those mountains, it isn't surprising to learn that Democrat politics appeal to these poverty-stricken communities.

Despite living a rugged agrarian life in rocky terrain, forced to supplant their meager incomes by raising their own livestock, growing their own corn, and even by selling moonshine, many of these folks secretly yearn for any kind of government relief in whatever form it might take: a welfare check, food stamps, etc.

For those of us who have looked out past the horizon, though, we know that relying on government handouts is the road to ruin. The same politician who says, "I feel your pain", and offers no more than a 16 dollar increase in annual welfare payments to a family of four is also the same politician who wants to destroy your coal mining jobs.

When a misguided Ralph Stanley sits here and says, "I think I know a little something about the families of Southwest Virginia,...and we need a change from the past 8 years", I sadly shake my head and say, "Ralph, Ralph, Ralph. I hardly knew ya'. Don't you know that you're getting in bed with the devil?"

Coal Regs Would Kill Jobs, Boost Energy Bills

By Paul Bedard

Posted: June 8, 2011

Two new EPA pollution regulations will slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electric rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent, according to a new study based on government data.

Overall, the rules aimed at making the air cleaner could cost the coal-fired power plant industry $180 billion, warns a trade group.

“Many of these severe impacts would hit families living in states already facing serious economic challenges,” said Steve Miller, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “Because of these impacts, EPA should make major changes to the proposed regulations before they are finalized,” he said.

The EPA, however, tells Whispers that the hit the industry will suffer is worth the health benefits. “EPA has taken a number of sensible steps to protect public health, while also working with industry and other stakeholders to ensure that these important Clean Air Act standards—such as the first ever national Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for coal-fired power plants—are reasonable, common-sense, and achievable,” said spokesman Brendan Gilfillan. [Read Rep. Darrell Issa: Obama's Bad Policy, Harmful Regulations Add to Gas Prices.]

What’s more, officials said that just one of the rules to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions will would yield up to $290 billion in annual health and welfare benefits in 2014. They say that amounts to preventing up to 36,000 premature deaths, 26,000 hospital and emergency room visits, and 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma. “This far outweighs the estimated annual costs,” says an official on background.

Still, the EPA did note that the two new antipollution rules are “pending” and that the agency has “accepted and are considering feedback” from the industry.

The industry says the costs and potential to lose four jobs for every new clean energy job created isn’t worth the rules, especially in a job-starved economy.

Referring to the analysis of the EPA regulations from National Economic Research Associates, Miller said they would be the most expensive rules ever imposed on power plants.

Coal-fired energy plants currently fuel about half of the nation’s energy supply.(source)

Appalachian Journal: The Man Who Moved A Mountain

This is Bob Childress, the man who moved a mountain.

He was raised in southwest Virginia, and left an indelible mark on the community of mountain folk who have lived largely alone in America since colonial times. The roads that existed into this rocky terrain were unpaved, eroded, and impassable during many parts of the year. It wasn't until Bob Childress saw a reason to start a road improvement project that the rest of the world discovered Buffalo Mountain, in present day Floyd County, Virginia.

I say "discovered", but let's admit: the rest of the world has made potshots and ridiculed the Appalachian people for many, many, years. It wasn't so much that the world discovered us, as it was that we discovered the world outside our mountains. When I was growing up in Pilot, Virginia, only a few miles from Buffalo Mountain, I went to school in Riner, where it was common to see other kids who had never left the state of Virginia.

Such was life for the families of southwest Virginia, many of whom had roots dating back over 200 years in these Appalachian hovels.

I have grown up hearing the American conscience tell me in one breath, "Don't make fun of black people. Or Jews. Or Italians. Or Mexicans." But in the next breath, I was forced to watch Hollywood's portrayal of us (Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, etc), which never once blinked when telling the world that it was ok to dress us up in rags, put stupid words in our mouths, and mock our sense of right and wrong in this world.

It still goes on today, of course. Cultural relativism is a concept that university professors preach to American youths while ignoring its meaning when it comes to the only racial group left to ridicule: southern whites.

Some would say that this is a sure sign that we have won. Why, we're so advanced that we can even mock and stereotype the very people who won America it's beginning. What else could be a sign of an elevated culture? While we are uber careful to edit our words when speaking of the black child who behaves like a savage in the streets of any major city in America, we forget all of that sensitivity when ridiculing the hillbillies of the Appalachian Mountains.

This sentiment is lost on the overeducated, however. The average academic is far too sophisticated to appreciate a people who grew up in the mountains. It doesn't matter that without the Virginia Blues, whom Colonel Washington proclaimed to be more able and brave than the professional British soldiers he'd been accustomed to, the soft whites from Europe who came along after all of the fighting was over wouldn't have a comfy perch from which to cast their stereotypes of us.

We understand the irony, though. That's why we say "forget them". We are more than happy to listen to our banjo music, drink our natural spring water, and race our moonshine speedsters around a dirt track for fun.

We've made roads to the outside world, but we've discovered that it won't lead us to salavation. Or even wisdom.

If you've never read "The Man Who Moved A Mountain", you ought to. It is a brief glimpse into my people from the past 100 years, told through the lens of a Pittsburgh reporter in the 1950's.

Appalachian Journal: Lucy Atkinson's Story

From left: Phyllis Epperly, Tim Atkinson, Connie Hall and Vivian Semones hold quilts made by mother and grandmother Lucy Atkinson.

By Sean Kotz
CHRISTIANSBURG, Va. -- She was called Mommy and Grandma by her family and "Aunt Lucy" by just about everyone else.

She was known for her hard work and soft heart, but Lucy Atkinson, in the last year of her life and at the age of 96, did something remarkable.

She hand-sewed 18 quilts.

"If you didn't get one, that was your fault," joked daughter Vivian Semones as she gathered with her family to tell her mother's story, "because all you had to do was ask."

By most people's estimation, Atkinson lived a hard life and might have had every right to feel weary in her later years. Her father was a sharecropper who lost the ability to feed his family after a drought, and Atkinson had to go to work at a mill at 14. She never had anything that one might call leisure time, spending much of her day cooking, washing, making and repairing clothes, and hand-churning butter for extra income.

In fact, her daughter Phyllis Epperly noted that people would come from as far away as Roanoke on a weekly basis to get her butter.

"I don't care what time of the morning you got up, the woman was up," recalled her grandson, Tim Atkinson. "The fire was going and the woman was up. And you go to bed at night, and the woman was still up."

Her hands were often raw from cleaning, scratched by blackberry thorns, or frozen from doing laundry in the winter. And after a lifetime of hard labor, she learned to drive a car at age 59 and went to work at a regular job.

So there was little time for pleasure sewing while she was raising her family -- for Lucy Atkinson, sewing was a matter of survival, putting clothes on her family's backs and quilts on their beds to fight off frigid nights.

However, in her later years, life afforded more time to sew for pleasure, and she was able to produce more quilts.

And while she had a sewing machine, she chose to hand-stitch each one to ensure quality. On this point, in near unison, the family repeated one of her favorite sayings: "If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right."

Her youngest daughter, Connie Hall, called her hand-sewn quilts a "gift of herself." Displaying a tag sewn into her quilt that reads, "Made with love by Mommy," and Hall pointed out that when Atkinson knew her time was getting short, she set to work on making a quilt for each member of the family.

In relative secrecy, she began working on quilts for each person individually, choosing colors and themes to fit each personality.

After she died Oct. 29, they were presented this past Christmas posthumously ... all except for one. The quilt for her grandson, Tim Atkinson, had disappeared.

A lifelong fan of Virginia Tech's sports programs, his was an orange and maroon quilt with Tech logos patched in. But on Christmas morning, it was nowhere to be found.

It occurred to them that the quilt might have been given away to the Roanoke Rescue Mission with her own clothes as was part of her final wishes. They called and found that a VT blanket had come through there and been sold.

At that point, Tim Atkinson's wife, Penny, went into action, organizing a search party for the missing quilt, offering rewards and a buyback, and contacting the media to help retrieve this piece of family history. And then, out of nowhere, it turned up at Tim Atkinson's mother's house.

It was like a second Christmas for Tim Atkinson, who said he had not let his initial disappointment get the better of him and had quietly resigned himself to live with the loss of her last gift to him.

But with admiration and emotion showing through his smile, he said:

"I guess for me, this makes it all the more special, especially knowing that this was one of the last things she did in her life." (source)