To really understand someone even if you don’t share their life experiences at least to try to get to know where they are coming from you have to make an attempt to get in their shoes. This is one of the great hypocracy’s of the left where you get the standard “we care about everybody dogma and everybody is equal blather” but in reality it’s a great sham. And I’m not coming at this as someone from the right or the left for that matter. Also I am not pro-coal nor do I have a family connection to the industry or the coalfields. In fact I find mountaintop removal ghastly and what the coal industry is doing to the water concerns me a whole lot more than carbon anything.

However, what the Obama administration and the EPA in particular is doing to the people who work in and owe their survival to the coal industry is a form of violence in an economic manner. And you being a West Virginian should know what generation after generation of these people have gone through to understand where they are coming from and what their reaction is. These people and their ancestors have been pissed on by the north, the south, the Republicans, the robber barrons and now the democrats in DC.

The lack of acknowledging this and understanding the pain and fear being inflicted on these people and not showing some compassion towards fellow West Virginian’s by other West Virginia’s is sad and frightening. These people stand to lose their incomes their homes and their way of life. And you then ponder why they would be so irrational as to vote for a piece of crap convict? What other choice do they have? If a man shows up at my house and sets it on fire (Obama) and another man brings water to put it out I know who I am going to assist. And if I resist this man burning my home and he is a different color than me it does not mean that I am a racist or ignorant hick. It means I’m trying to do what is best for me and my family which at least in my mind is what a normal person would do.

President Obama is deficient in many ways and is by no means the saint that many of you in the press paint him out to be. Had this man been a compassionate and responsible president he would have sat down with the leaders of WV and sent a message to the people showing compassion, a sense of understanding and made a commitment to help the people who would lose jobs if his plan for the coal industry goes through. Because if he kills off coal there are no good paying jobs in WV for these people. And a real President and a true leader who cared about his country and its people not just some of them would come up with a plan in the face of creating a massive unemployment situation to make it right with these people he is harming just like the harmed environment deserves as well.

If Obama was worth a darn he would be able to recogonize and care about what his plans would do to WV he would have come up with a plan to countermeasure the economic disaster he will be inflicting on these people. He would allocate funding and come up with plans to bring in new industries to employ them. And I’m not talking about the crazy’s who say that building wind farms on top of mountaintop removal sites will employ just as many people as the coal industry. That is pure fantasy. Have you ever been to a wind farm. Do you see people standing there with poles turning the turbines? A responsible and caring president would do everything that he could to make life better for these people but Obama has not reached out to them and in fact has done nothing but the opposite.

So that’s it in a nutshell. If you cannot fathom the rage and where it is coming from then I feel sad for you because you do not understand WV. Maybe you just have such a political attachment to party that it won’t allow you to view the world openly unless it is viewed openly with the party’s glasses on. These folks and their ancestors have fought and died to get what little they have. They’ve been bombed by the US airforce (before it was the Airforce) and they been flooded and drowned by corrupt companies. They were made into slaves at one time forced into accepting in payment for their deadly labor company script only usable at a company store. They fought to create a union to give them decent wages and benefits and many people died in that process.

And what do they get in return? A union that won’t back them, a party that they loved so dearly that has deserted and trashed them and people in their own state that have no knowledge, compassion or understanding of why they are now considered crazy. Well if I was in their shoes I would be crazy too.