General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The median income of a coal miner is about $80K [View all]WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)just up and be an electrician.
But to your query: Coal-miners are the backbone of the Industrial Revolution, here and in England.
Otherwise known as the birth of the economic superiority of the United States, for there is no steel without coal; there are no cars, bridges, airplanes, buildings, without steel. And so forth.
Our canal system was for the transporting of coal. Coal was King.
Now King Coal has been deposed, and perhaps rightly so (although Chernobyl and Fukushima (and hard-by Coal Country's own Three-Mile Island) prove that even some forms of "clean energy" can kill).
But his subjects are still living on the land, as feudal serfs after the Black Plague wiped out the nobility. Where to go? How to live? To whom to pledge new allegiance?
They made a bad bet, and I, the daughter of a coal-miner in Schuylkill County, PA., born in COALdale hospital, have a hard time drumming up sympathy.
Yet coal-miners also represent the strength of unions, also dying off in this Great Extinction Event known as the Trump Administration.
So let them have their publicity, even if we cannot give them either sympathy or jobs.