I've always been a proud West Virginian. I am not a knight of the Golden Horseshoe (you non-West Virginians will just have to Google that), but I do know a lot about our state's history. I can tell you the state flower and bird and animal. I can sing every verse of the official state song, "The West Virginia Hills."
Yet the holiday finds me with mixed emotions. I was walking with a friend the other day along the Kanawha River in Charleston, the state capital and the city where I live. The conversation turned to our state, as it often does when hillbillies get together.
Our state has a colorful history. There is still a wild beauty to the place, which is completely enclosed in the Appalachian mountains, and that served as a type of borderland between the native nations who inhabited the eastern U.S. when Morgan Morgan, the first white settler came to the area.
Yet by contrast, it is also a violent place, in a way that has captured the American imagination. First came the conflict with the native peoples, like the Mingo, as they were forced from their homes and hunting grounds. There were the infamous feuds between large Scots-Irish clans, the most legendary being the Hatfield-McCoy conflict. The feud lasted decades and resulted in over a dozen murders of men and women, most of which were never prosecuted. Then came the mine wars, with bloody clashes between Baldwin-Felts detectives and coal miners led by the fiery Mother Jones. Sheriff Sid Hatfield was murdered on the McDowell County courthouse steps and the U.S. army was eventually sent in to do battle with the miners on Blair Mountain.
Perhaps it's just my own perspective, but for such a small place, there seems to be much bloodletting: corrupt state and county officials, wielding their power to quell dissent; Klan lynchings; fights between revenuers and moonshiners; hundreds of deaths under tons of coal; unsolved murders of small-town socialites; fatal floods caused by acts of God and the carelessness of industry; and untold incidences of domestic violence. There was even a "textbook war" - a violent conflict over a school book adoption in the 1970s that led to shootings and school bombings.
I suppose I've been thinking about this the last few years. As I've traveled more of the state, I've become more convinced of the fundamental violence of poverty. It's not just that the poor are driven more to overt acts of violence, along with drug use, alcoholism, obesity, and all the rest. It's also that poverty itself is dehumanizing. We have accepted a myth in this country of romantic notions of poverty. But poverty is not ennobling. The lives of the very poor are lives of incredible stress, which some seek to alleviate through OxyContin or booze, and that occasionally erupt between family members or friends. Those who have not fallen prey to these likely find themselves in church pews on Sunday mornings, where they hear that poverty is only temporary, that they should busy themselves laying up treasure where moth and rust cannot destroy, that they should pray and have faith, that the God who created them wills their poverty, or else that they simply lack the faith necessary to reap the reward they desire. They live in extreme rural locations with no access to routine medical care or other services their countrymen take for granted.
What we fail to notice is the systemic poverty - and violence - of the place. We have a government that serves the interests of the fossil fuel industries, both coal and gas. When they aren't doing that, they occupy themselves with ensuring ready and quick availability of weapons to the criminal and mentally ill, and wrap it in patriotism and Jesus.
Lest anyone think I'm advocating some type of socialism, I am not. It's just that our entire state has built itself around one or two business interests, instead of the interest of her own people. There are still "coal barons" who pull millions (and billions) of dollars of minerals from beneath the feet of the poorest of the poor. We accept that they "own" the coal - forgetting the untold eons it took to form. Many who comfort the poor with tales of golden streets rush to defend the rights of the super-rich to possess the Earth itself. The meek may inherit the Earth, but Don Blankenship probably owns the mineral rights.
It's not just coal and gas, though they historically have profited the most. And it's not just our government - it's our entire culture. We do not ask our children, "What are your aspirations?" Instead, we seek to prepare them to serve the dreams of the wealthy.
I know that West Virginia is not alone in this regard, but it serves as a case study, perhaps, of our failures to our fellow travelers in this world. And it's also my home.
So happy birthday, Mountain State. I hope this evening to enjoy the fireworks over the Kanawha, sitting on the sun porch of my apartment, just across the street from the governor's mansion. My dream for you is that you come to embody your motto: "Montani Semper Liberi" - "Mountaineers are always free" - and that this freedom would come to embrace the very least among us.
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