Appalachia, Democracy, and Cultural Equity (cont'd)

Why Not Give Up?

Given the despairing economic and social history in central Appalachia during the past 100 years, it is not unusual for someone to say, "Why don't you people just pick up and leave?"  Almost always the tone implies, "After all, you are white."  In the 1960's some of the absentee corporate owners, with input from the Army Corps of Engineers, sketched out such a plan:  The region would be declared an energy preserve, a national sacrifice zone, and all but the necessary work force would be relocated.  Especially for Appalachians with Indian blood, the plan had a familiar ring:  In 1838, Cherokees turned to the mountains to hide their children from the forced march west-the Trail of Tears.

The leaving proposition also presumes that there is somewhere to go.  When the coal and timber industries arrived after the Civil War, many families did pick up and move west to the Ozarks and then into Indian Territory, when it was taken back from the Indians.  Or they scattered to other diminishing frontiers to pursue freedom.  This marked migration of the 1890's dispels the then popular, economically convenient stereotype that Appalachian people were stuck in their hollows, too ignorant to find their way out-too dumb to discover progress.  Throughout the boom and bust coal cycles of the past 100 years, tens of thousands of Appalachians have come and gone, often moving to industry jobs in cities like Flint, Michigan, coming back to visit regularly, despite more time spent driving than visiting, and coming home to be buried.  Flint is not an option any longer.  Neither is the frontier.  In the face of ongoing hardship, many Appalachian people are determined to stay in their adopted homeland.  In order to have a homeland to stay in, however, Appalachians will have to become less confused and more self-reliant.

There are signs of stiffening resistance to domination.  During the 1990 United Mine Workers of America-Pittston coal strike, the union borrowed the Civil Rights Movement's strategy of massive nonviolent resistance, and Jesse Jackson's speeches were cheered by thousands of white miners, their families and supporters.  Citizens' groups in numerous counties in the past several years have nixed plans for new waste dumps (New Jersey already buries 16 percent of its garbage in Kentucky).  Now, for the first time in 100 years, corporate property taxes on unmined mineral wealth in eastern Kentucky are about to be assessed at something like full value.  In 1988, by an overwhelming 80 percent, the voters amended the state constitution to outlaw the hated Broad Form Deed, which gave corporate mineral rights precedence over individual owner's surface rights.  And in 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled the State's public school system unconstitutional because of its inequity.

Such victories in a one-industry economy are threatened, however, at every turn.  Some argue that it is too little, too late.  In less than a decade, mechanization has reduced the mining workforce by 30-plus percent, and the supranational corporations are looking to cheaper labor and more abundant coal in faraway places like China.  More and more, Appalachia appears to be less the exception than the national norm:  Many communities now find themselves playing host to businesses that have little sense of community responsibility and are owned by someone somewhere else.  The paradigm of domination rests on what is proving daily to be a tragic misperception:  that the interests and welfare of the few are more important than the interests and welfare of the many.  To wit, the 1980's saw the greatest shift in wealth in the history of the United States:  The bottom 20 percent of the American people on the economic ladder have lost 9 percent of their income, while the top 2 percent have gained 29 percent more income.  Now, we find ourselves with a millionaire president, Cabinet, Congress, and media.  If they are not millionaires themselves, they owe their office to great wealth.  There now exists what Appalachia knows all too well and what Thomas Jefferson-who, nominally at least, stood for a broad-based democracy reliant on the will and consent of the majority of the people-likely feared the most:  an almost perfect confluence of wealth and power.  Is not such a plutocracy as odious as the monarchy of King George?

For many Appalachians, it has been acutely embarrassing to be poor and white.  But the fact is, Appalachia never has been white-white.  Central Appalachia, with its rugged terrain of mountains, was one of the last pockets of the U.S. frontier.  For such people as the Cherokee, it was hunting grounds of virgin forest.  For a hundred years, runaway slaves made their way up the Appalachian chain toward the Susquehanna and the promise of freedom.  Daniel Boone roamed thereabouts along with those relatively few hardy folk who chose to pursue their happiness away from civilization and get by on wild game, subsistence farming, barter, and herbal remedies.  Many of these first frontiersmen and women were of Scotch-Irish descent.  Today Appalachians hear themselves in their African-derived banjoes, still eat their native corn bread and poke salad, and occasionally doctor themselves with herbal remedies.  Scotch-Irish is not the only blood that flows in our veins.  Those white Americans who are not making an effort to come to terms with the fact that they do not live in a white-white world, nation, or community are not realistic.

Appalachia's struggle for change in the nineties must continue to center itself in its communities, where the problems are tangible and one can get a grip on the solutions.  One by one Appalachian communities must extricate themselves from the debility of feeling inferior, the morass of dependency, the divisiveness of blaming someone else, the slavery of trickle down.  Self-reliance must be bolstered all around:  economically, politically, and culturally.  In this struggle, one hopes that each community will not sell itself short, but aspire to the highest ideals that its citizens can imagine.  In so doing, a community will have to risk its insecurities and sensitivities by implicating itself in the wrongs that it has perpetuated and allowed to happen to itself.  Only then can we have something like a second American revolution, and only then will it be possible for us to be a freer and happier people.  One ringing lesson of this quincentenary from an historical perspective is that democracy is an arduous, sometimes fearful undertaking, and that the alternative is servitude.

 

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