Back to the Future

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer… . Hester Lynch Piozzi

It has been said, quite rightly, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. To prove that this was not a thought that came lightly off the top of the unknown coiner’s head, this week, the citizens of Eastern Kentucky will see a presidential candidate come into this area, where he hopes to point out the debilitating effects of poverty. Of course, every news source has already pointed out that it was in 1968, when then Senator Robert Kennedy, D., New York, came through this area, to highlight the same problems. And here we are, almost forty years later, and these problems persist.

Poverty, it would seem, is endemic to this area, much to our chagrin. Eastern Kentucky is synonymous with poverty to most of the nation. For those of us from this area who left it, for whatever reason, we have all seen how we are viewed by those outside our area when the subject of abject poverty arises. In my case, I was a student at the University of Kentucky, it was in a Political Science class concerning the Soviet Union, we were discussing the hardscrabble lot of many of its citizens, and one girl, who had traveled there the summer before, was trying to convey how some of these people had to live. She struggled for a bit for an analogy that we might all be able to grasp-she reported, for instance, that many people in one area lived in houses that lacked even a floor-and finally she remember the region to her east, and suggested hopefully “I guess it’s like Eastern Kentucky.”

It was at this point that I felt obliged to step in and to correct her a bit. “Yes” I agreed, “life is hard in Eastern Kentucky, but, so far as I know, not many of us are walking barefooted on dirt indoors!” And while the object of my correction remained unconvinced, I am sure that any fellow citizen from our area in that classroom was glad that someone had tried to correct the impression that everyone from this area are in such dire straights.

There is a tendency with Eastern Kentuckians to bristle a bit when the outside world attempts to show the depth of poverty in our region. We all remember how angry everyone became when CBS came to Muddy Gut. (Ya gotta hand it to them boys from New York. You’d have to go a long way to find a name more apropos than “Muddy Gut”. Nothing says poverty quite like that!) But in the midst of the hubbub that ensued, some sage fellow (I cannot recall just who that was, either, but if it was you, please write in, and claim the credit due) pointed something out. It was he who said that you can get mad all you want to, but the fact of the matter is, poverty does exist here, and there isn’t much you can say or do to make it look pretty.

One question that wants answering is why this region is portrayed thusly? Or, to put it another way, why should poverty be able to take hold of the people of this region in the manner in which it has, and refuse to loosen its grip? This region, after all, is not like the lands left to the American Indian tribes in the late 1800’s. The Oglala Sioux, for instance, had all their ancestral lands taken from them gradually, until they found themselves on a minute portion of what had been theirs. To be exact, at one time, they could claim the whole of South Dakota west of the Missouri River. They are now confined to what is known as the Pine Ridge reservation. (Pine Ridge! Sounds like something from the Ozarks, another hard luck area.) Pine Ridge is theirs because not much of value was ever found there. And the hard lives that these natives live testifies quite nicely to this fact. Unemployment there is at forty-five percent.

Eastern Kentucky, on the other hand, is a land that was, and in some respects, still is, rich in natural resources. Timber abounded here, and coal and natural gas did as well. So how is it that an area so rich could produce so much poverty? Simple. The same say any portion of the globe that has a plethora of the earth’s bounty produces a native population that has nothing; outsiders took anything worth taking. That happened to the Oglala Sioux. It is happening in Niger, where there are great reserves of petroleum, and a population that makes most Eastern Kentuckians look like Croesus. And it happened to Eastern Kentucky, where the device used to separate the original owners from their property was the “broad-form deed”.

History shows that it was the period following the discovery of the great storehouse of wealth here in the form of natural resources that the poverty of its citizens made itself known. Every generation since has been plagued by it, some, of course, more than others. My mother, for instance, grew up in the company towns, and company houses, while my grandfather worked the mines, and, as in the song by Merle Travis, pledged his soul as collateral to the Company Store, where he spent the script-a coal company’s answer to real wages. And like most of his fellow miners, because of the coal dust that he breathed in during his incredibly long hours in the mines, and the cigarettes that he smoked-courtesy of another loving segment of our economy, which he and his fellow addicts helped to make rich-he died in his early 60’s. That was about the extent of a miner’s lifespan in those days.

Early death and black lung are the legacy of the mines. Life got a bit easier during the years when the union was strong. That was before the Reagan Revolution so enfeebled labor. And before we became aware of just how much better life was when we follow the dictates of “the market”. And after we became aware of how evil the anti-poverty programs devised under such names as “The New Frontier” were. And it is here where we came in, where we are still denying what is in front of our faces; the poverty in which so many of our citizens live. Another presidential candidate is coming to town to point out what so many of us are already aware of, but which many of us still refuse to acknowledge.