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Published: March 05, 2008 09:48 pm    print this story  

Our Readers Speak, Thursday, March 6, 2008

Recent coal article deserves ‘The Focker’






I was stunned when I read Dawn Dayton’s recent piece in this newspaper that glorified the coal industry and their so-called reclamation. While she was riding around in the mining industry’s corporate helicopter with the Coalcaine Heads, my house and property, and that of my neighbors, was being blasted.

While we are forced to sit here at the bottom of the mountain in apprehension of fly rock, rolling boulders and mudslides, she has the nerve to write about the reclamation mining companies do. Of course the Coalcaine heads only took her to the pretty one they dressed up just for her and other gullible media folks. Did they fly her over the mountain top removal site above my home and Marsh Fork Elementary School? Of course not! If flying over this mess doesn’t horrify you, nothing will.

I have read coal-friendly writing before, but Dawn Dayton should receive the coal industry equivalent to “The Pulitzer” for this piece. They should call it “The Focker,” for the Friends of Coal. It should become an annual award given to the media person that goes beyond the call of duty to sub-humanize those of us that have lived in these mountains and hollers for the past 200 years, but now stand in the way of the coal industries annihilation of our state. Abraham Lincoln is turning over in his grave after that piece of writing.

The coal industry can continue to buy state judges and now perhaps some media types as well, but they can’t, and won’t buy the American public. What is taking place in southern West Virginia is a crime that cries for justice. It has been hidden far too long. It is now being told all across this country and America is listening. Justice will be served.



Bo Webb

Naoma



Editorial nothing but a free ad for coal






Dawn Dayton’s editorial praising mountaintop removal is little more than a reprint of the coal association’s “fact” book with Walker Machinery comments tossed in for flavor. I take particular offense to her statements, “As we traveled to see the reclaimed and working mines, we saw few homes or other signs of civilization. The places we were shown were very remote, meaning that the dust and noise from the operation would have little impact on the general populace.” In other words, I’m expendable because I live in the country. How many of us does it take to qualify as “civilization” or “general populace”?

Roger Lilly, Dayton’s tour guide, said in a WV Public Broadcasting interview that, because our population density is low, “we have an obligation to the greater good for the people” and “we have to provide electricity and power for our urban brothers and sisters." This logic clearly condemns us, our children, and our homes as acceptable sacrifices so New Yorkers can live in wasteful luxury with Times Square lit up all night.

I’m reminded of Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hears a Who.” A world comes inches from destruction because Horton’s neighbors deny its existence. The Whos only save their world by shouting “We’re here!” in unison. To our cry of “We’re here!” Dayton responds with “No you’re not, and it wouldn’t matter if you were.”

Of course I don’t have room for a full rebuttal of Dayton’s editorial; average citizens aren’t granted unfettered access to the editorial page as coal barons are. But at the very least, The Register-Herald owes its readers an investigative article, based on researched facts and the opinions of people tired of being sacrificed for Walker’s profits. Otherwise, Dayton’s editorial is nothing more than a free ad for the coal association.



Vernon Haltom

Naoma

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