I am in Abingdon, Virginia as part of the Appalachian Community Fund’s First Hand Educational Tour, designed to introduce folks form out side the region to the conditions that those inside of it face every day. Tonight we met with folks from the Virginia Black Lung Association, which works to support disabled coal miners, as well as the Tennessee Health Care Campaign, which words to win affordable, quality health care for all Tennesseans.
Let me tell you about Allen Hess, one of the Black Lung Association members. Allen’s grandfather was killed in a mining accident when Allen’s father was 12, meaning that – as the oldest son—Mr. Hess had to go to work in the mines at an age when most America boys are still in elementary school. Allen’s dad eventually would die of black lung, a disease where a miner’s lungs are destroyed by years of breathing in coal and rock dust in the mines. Allen, a retired miner himself, now works to make sure that other miners get the benefits they deserve – miners like Calvin Dunford, whom we also met. Mr., Dunford had to engage in 27 years of litigation to get his former employer to agree to cover his health costs for a disease he incurred on the job. Basically, the company was betting Mr. Dunford would die first. It’s their standard technique. Most miners do in fact die first or give up due to the absence of legal representation and/or the costs associated with it.
It would be hard for me to explain how so impressed and moved I was by these folks’ strength and heroism. They simply refuse to be expendable in the face of a power structure that is set up to make them so. In fact, the entire Appalachian region is judged to be expendable within the American polity: the New York Times reported on April 22 that life expectancy in most Appalachian counties is actually declining. And this is not an insignificant difference, as the Times reported “The researchers also compared the 2.5 percent of counties with the lowest life expectancies and the 2.5 percent with the highest. The disparity between those two groups rose to 11 years for men in 1999, from 9 years in 1983, and to 7.5 years from 6.7 in women” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDC1F31F931A15757C0A96E9C8B63&scp=1&sq=life+expectancy&st=nyt). So men living more affluent counties get more than a decade extra of life than those in Appalachia. Geography is destiny?