Sixteen Tons

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You know what I loved about Erin Brockovich? She didn't know what she was doing until she did. She saw injustice, and maybe she didn't fight it with the purest of intentions, but she fought anyway. She was fighting, not people, but faceless entities that had power and money and laws on their side.

How do you fight something that doesn't have a face?

I was in New York, living a forever dream, and all I could think about was the fact that some faceless entity had been spending the last few years quietly buying mineral rights to the entire mountain and valley that defined my childhood.

Now there's going to be a coal mine destroying every last thing I love about the hometown I came back to.

I find myself sputtering things like:

cancer.
birth defects.
pollution.
tainted drinking supply.
the tourism of the two summer camps.
the value of the homes of the Norquists, and the Taylors, and the Powells, and the Cranfills.
gray dust.
flattened mountains.

I've lived in a coal mining town.

I don't have facts. I don't have a face to fight against. I don't have any rights to this property.

I just have enough life experience and indignant rage to tell you that this is wrong. This will destroy our community. This will change everything once and for all.

Destroying one more mountain, one more valley, MY MOUNTAIN, MY VALLEY, one more tiny town in Appalachia no one cares anything about...

They, the faceless they, can make money here, but they won't live here after HERE is destroyed.

http://www.daytoncoalmine.com/media.html