As I sat watching yet another video of a West Virginia mountain being pulverized, I found myself thinking of the final scenes of V for Vendetta...
In particular, I thought of the scene in which thousands of people in identical masks surround the headquarters of government corruption from all directions. As fireworks erupt over the city, they take their masks off. And who is revealed? Terrorists with wild and crazy looks in their eyes? Nope. Women, men, old people, kids...just ordinary folks like you and me. I'm wondering if it will take something like this to end the insanity of the ongoing war against communities of Appalachia.
Massey Energy blasts another chunk off of Cherry Pond Mountain in West Virginia (Bo Webb photo).
I feel compelled to replay the images, to look again through the flying boulders and swirling dust, to listen around the edges of Bo's voice.
Dust -- miniscule flakes of silica, really, with arsenic, selenium, mercury and any other element that happens to live in the rocks up there -- drifts down through the hollow. You can hear Bo start to clear his throat and cough. That's what people do when they breathe in pulverized glass.
Here's something I don't get: How come Massey Energy's (or any other mining company's) detonations aren't considered a criminal act? Every time they set these things off, a microcrystalline death cloud spreads out from the charge's epicenter and into living, breathing communities of people and wildlife.
Coalfield residents (including miners and their families!) all across the United States are breathing this stuff. So are the people near ground zero of TVA's coal ash disaster. And who knows how many others?
Toxic silca dust from a dynamite blast on Cherry Pond Mountain settles on Clay's Fork and Peachtree communities in West Virginia. (Bo Webb photo)
This is genocide, and it's not okay. If anything needs to be killed off, it's the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.
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