Where I grew up, everyone read the “big city paper,” The Parkersburg News. It’s a Republican rag from one of the more Republican cities in West Virginia.
And every Sunday, it publishes letters to the editor. Generally, more conservative readers feel more comfortable submitting letters, and some of these letters have some of the most exotic information in them. I make it habit to read them on Sunday. It’s usually good for a laugh.
However, every once in a while someone submits a letter that really strikes out at all that bullshit, and yesterday, there was this little gem:
Although I now live in Ohio, I am a native of the Mountain State [West Virginia]. One of my ancestors was Indian fighter Samuel Ferguson, who fought at King’s Mountain and was one of the first settlers in what is now Cabell/Wayne County, W.Va. Therefore, it both saddens and puzzles me that many present-day West Virginians are inclined to oppose their own best interests.
For 150 years, outside interests have controlled the destiny of this region. They have provided jobs, but they have also trashed the landscape and, in many instances, have treated West Virginia workers as “disposable resources.” Early UMW organizers realized this when they stood against corrupt and greedy mine-owners at Blair Mountain in the 1920s.
Today, there are other problems. Unlike Ohio, West Virginia is not a “swing-state.” This is because of the area’s declining population. Many West Virginians have been forced to leave the area because jobs have been eliminated or shipped overseas by greedy corporations whose only concern is the almighty bottom-line.
In the recent campaign, these same vested interests put forth numerous lies about a mythical “Obama war on coal,” but neglected to tell West Virginians that the decline of the coal-industry is not the “fault” of the recently re-elected Obama administration nor EPA regulations, but because of a drastic drop in the price of natural-gas, (engineered by opportunistic Wall Street commodities traders) that makes it cheaper to use gas instead of coal in electricity-generating plants. Despite this fact, many Mountaineers were conned into endorsing a candidate who epitomized the “vulture-capitalist” ideology that has decimated West Virginia’s economy for the past five decades.
Some say that West Virginians cling too closely to “God and guns.” I disagree. The good people of this region have been betrayed by two other “g”s – “greed” and their own “gullibility.”
Fred O’Neill
Marietta [Ohio]
That’s pretty much it.
This was the first election in which I saw no campaign signs along the highway for the Democratic nominee for president.
Senator Manchin and Governor Tomblin were both up for election this time. They both distanced themselves from the president, claiming that they would not endorse either Obama or Romney.
They won handily.
One state political figure who would not distance himself from the president was the attorney general, Darrell McGraw. He was always a champion of organized labor and consumer protection, and he made more than a few enemies with powerful interests.
He might have won had he done what Manchin and Tomblin did. But he never denounced the president. I remember him campaigning for Obama when I went to see Joe Biden at an event in Charleston. I pretty much knew that when the election cycle began, that he would be the one politician who would not turn his back on the president for political expediency.
And it cost him the election.
Some will say that the war on coal meme made the whole state shake its Democratic roots, which were once so strong that it once voted for Dukakis in that wave election in which George Bush the smarter won a healthy landslide.
Maybe.
But I think it’s something else.
I think we’ve seen a systematic attempt to keep West Virginia colonial in its mentality.
There has been a war against good quality public education in the state. Most school systems don’t have the tax base to hire good quality teachers, and those good quality teachers who start in the state wind up going somewhere else.
When people aren’t taught critical thinking skills, they believe whatever bullcrap comes filtering down to them. Fox News is popular around here. And a high school dropout “evangelist” is somehow more qualified to explain the nuances of foreign policy than “them smart people on the teevee.”
But I don’t blame all of this on the failing public school system.
I blame almost all of it on the fundamentalist churches, which engage in a very strong and systematic war against critical thinking. Here’s a very good example of what they do:
When people are taught that creationism is a valid scientific fact and that evolution is an evil force that is being shoved onto them by “experts,” then the qualified expert becomes someone to be distrusted.
It becomes acceptable to deny what the qualified expert tells you about the history of your state and of your nation.
If your preacher says that this has always been a Christian nation and then denounces the qualified historians who say otherwise, then you’re going to trust your preacher.
And he’s gonna tell you who to vote for.
He may not endorse, but he’ll definitely tell you that the only moral issues on the ballot are abortion and gay marriage.
And that’s as far as people take it.
It’s really quite sad.
The whole place is being turned into Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
