For Tomorrow You May Be in Utah!

I wonder if there are other parents in West Virginia who woke up this morning as I did - with a heavy heart. For the first time in 18 years my son’s shoes are not in the middle of the floor. We’ve sent him off to college, and we are so proud. So why the heavy heart?

Unlike those of us paddling back down the highway yesterday – hardly able to wait for the dirty laundry that our kids will bring home in 2 weeks - mothers and fathers, wives and children, brothers and sisters in Utah may wait forever.

Utah! Where – faces we do not recognize – are wrought with pain at the loss of those who they will never see again. We, as a people, now find ourselves staring down the ugly throat of a pile of questions too big to wrap our arms around. Why do we continue to send our people into one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet? Why are we so reluctant to stop living on the backs of miners and using so much electricity? And why are we so afraid to SAY NO TO COAL?

Why do we continue to tolerate big politics and big money when it comes to the safety of our fellow workers? How long are we going to believe the Richard Sticklers and the Robert Murrays and everyone else who is reaping the benefit off of our dead? What keeps us, as a people, from putting an end to this madness?

I have not doubt that Richard Stickler (MSHA) and Robert Murray (Murray Energy) feel downright terrible today. And they should. If you watch your TV closely you will see the tipples in action. Murray is selling every ounce of coal the rescuers have been pulling out of that mine since the day it collapsed. They launched a profitable extraction of coal, under the disguise of a rescue mission at a so-called closed mine, and put even more lives in danger to search for 6 innocent men that should never have been sent into this ready-to-collapse coal mine in the first place. Early in the disaster, when there was still time to save lives, they turned a deaf ear to offers of help from the United Mine Workers and chose instead to make “hit and miss” decisions that only made a horrible situation worse. And more bad news is, no doubt, yet to come.

The government will defend them. The elected officials will continue to be wined and dined by the Murrays. And we, never to be called innocent again, will continue to leave on the lights, fill up our gas tanks and run right out to buy that new energy hogging plasma TV screen. In the meantime, pseudo-investigations will be launched, rule changes will be proposed, and the only answer that will be printed in West Virginia and Utah is “America needs the energy…it’s a matter of national security…it means jobs, jobs, jobs … blahblahblah.” The worst is yet to come. I expect soon we will hear a clarion call for more Mountain Top Removal – better to have three people setting off dynamite and running giant extraction machines than three hundred working under ground.

Stop. Let us spend this day mourning the senseless loss of those loved ones in Utah – those faces that we don’t recognize. For it is through their sacrifice that we may hopefully find the courage to look for answers in our quest to feed our need for energy. And we must do this, if we are to know with certainty that they did not die in vain.