"Oh, brothers, let's go down, down to the river to pray..." -- O Brother Where Art Thou?
25. The Wrong Side of History
In the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2006, attorneys for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Surface Mining openly argued in federal courts that mountaintop removal mining in the coal fields had "no significant environmental impact."
This bizarre assertion initially draws a kind of jocular incredulity, appealing to our modern sense of the absurd. Ha. No impact. Good one.
But on reflection, you feel a creeping chill, as if a door has suddenly blown open, and in a moment of clarity you see this for what it is.
No environmental impact?
Blow the top off a mountain, bring a hundred million tons of rock crashing down into the valleys, kill everything living, poison the water and foul the air. And then claim there is no impact.
It's breathtaking. Nothing conceived by George Orwell or Heinrich Himmler comes close.
No environmental impact?
It just gags the soul, to stand on a roadside and look out over hundreds of miles of lifeless devastation, to see the black gunk coming from the faucets down in the miserable trailers in the leftover ravines, to see the cancer victims and the hollow eyes of the children of Appalachia. To stand where there had been one of the most diverse forest cultures in the world, and to think that any human being could mouth those weasely words: "no significant environmental impact."
To destroy a mountain range and then have the bald faced effronterry to claim there is no environmental impact. This is not just prevarication, not just mendacity, not just a lie. This deserves a hallowed spot in the great pantheon of history's magnificent lies.
No environmental impact?
Put it next to slavery being good for the slave ... Put it down the row from the Germans who were stabbed in the back in World War I or who only wanted the Sudetenland at the start of WWII ... Put it across from the light at the end of the tunnel, where someone is winning the hearts and minds of the people... Put it around the corner from the inferiority of other races or other religions ...
Put it in a place where the sun doesn't shine, in the museum of magnificent lies, in the doomed city located somewhere on the wrong side of history.
But put this down as well:
The people of Appalachia have reached a moment when we know, with certainty, one thing: We may still be in for a long, difficult fight, but we will win.
Mountaintop removal will be stopped -- by Republicans if they come to their senses, or by Democrats if Republicans drive themselves out of office -- But stopped, nevertheless, it will be.
We know this like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King knew that the South would have to change. And there is hardly an analogy more appropriate. Not just our rights but our very survival is in jeopardy, and we simply will not go down. Like William Faulkner's characters, we know what it is to endure. And endure. And endure.
The Bush administration's postion is now exposed like the bare winter mountains when the leaves fall away, and you can see clear through the woods to the rocky, naked truth. They want us out. They want to destroy the mountains. But they are on the wrong side of history.
And the people who mouth these terrible lies, these audacious mendacities -- Will they find themselves as full of regrets and remorse as those old racist rascals of the 1960s, the George Wallaces and the others who apologized in their old age for their young rage? Will they regret the destruction? Yes, if even the tiny embers of a human fire are left burning within them, they will erupt into fires of remorse.
The people of Appalachia dont accuse them, and we don't speak from the left or the right. We speak from the heart. We speak for the mountains and for the future.
So when you see people driving with their headlights on, or holding up flashlights or candles in the daylilght, what we are saying is that we hope the government and the coal companies will finally see the light, and realize that they are on the wrong side of history.
Because eventually they will see the truth blazing across Appalachia, and they will join us.
And be welcomed.