[Previous entry: "Chris Crittenden's Op Ed Article"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Agenda for the April 28, 2003 Meeting"]

 

It is a bumper sticker in eastern Kentucky.
Joe Bagley, the shop owner, sheriff and organizer had them made up.
Part Cherokee, part Scotsman, he is a voice of nature.
Kentuckians have lived with and by the land for centuries.
Coal has been part of the drama for generations.
Power mongers - outside interests - tipped any semblance of balance
and spurred into existence some of the finest, boldest and most desperate
organizing and leadership witnessed in this century.

It was just 1987 when laws were finally passed to override the Broad Form Deed.
Corporations like Pittston and Peabody can no longer strip the land
from beneath a family's home
in search of coal - their two inch seam, their six inch black artery
lying twenty, thirty or sixty feet under the foundation of a home,
beneath a family yard or garden, or the rope swing hanging high
from the arching branch of a massive and ancient
sweetgum tree,
liquidamber...
So now Jean Ritchie can go back to singing her sacred hymns,
her beloved ballads, and bring Black Waters out only for remembrance
and warning at the next public hearing
about another corporate attempt to make the grade
by sucking the essentials of place from the whole of a system
in the most cost effective, technologically advanced fashion,
with flagrant and denied disregard - even contempt -
for the spirits, souls, beings - voices - of the land.
Alan 2/19/99

 

[Archives] [Main Index]