Jack Latta
Dear Mr. President,
First, I would like to say congratulations on your recent re-election. I found your campaign to be one of promise and hope for America, where everyone regardless of race, creed, religion, or sexual orientation are given the same opportunities to succeed. It’s one of the things I admire most about your presidency.
I am writing you today because I would like to draw your attention to a region of America that is short on those opportunities, mired in soul-crushing prescription drug abuse, consistently under-performing education, rampant unemployment, and poverty. My home.
Eastern Kentucky, sir, is one of the poorest regions in this great country. According to recent surveys, the 5th Congressional District of Kentucky has the most intense and widespread poverty of any district in America. It’s not for lack of trying, sir, but there are painfully few opportunities. Those industries that we have clung to over the years — tobacco and now coal — have turned out to be bad bets. But we’ve tried to make the most of what we had lying around. That’s our way.
Your vision for the future of coal appears to be bleak. I believe your policies concerning coal are a sincere attempt to do what is best for America, working to eliminate environmentally damaging coal fire plants. But you can’t and you shouldn’t fault people here for feeling unfairly targeted by these policies. You may note that Floyd County, a historically Democratic county voted nearly 3-1 against your re-election. Those votes are a direct reflection of the decline of the coal industry.
We’ve worked and depended on the mines that produce that coal for two generations. It shouldn’t take your economics adviser long to ascertain that destroying an already impoverished region’s sole industry will decimate communities and have a trickle down effect on all other business.
So my question to you sir is this. If not coal, then what?
I invite you, Mr. President, to visit the 5th Congressional District of Kentucky, an honor you have yet to take. Meet a hardworking industrious people. A people who have worked tirelessly in some of the worst conditions for over a century. A people who take care of their own; no one sleeps on the streets here. We are a people, who frankly, sir, simply need an option, and we’ll run with it. Help us. Give us a direction.
All we ask is that if you must strip us of our past, please help us find a path to a future.
I so appreciated your letter to President Obama, and having been brought up in Eastern Kentucky, I understand your plight. My father, Steve Taulbee, has been gone 31 years and my mother 21 years. I left Hazard upon my marriage in the late sixties, though I have been back quite a few times, I rarely saw things the same as I had with younger eyes. Change happens rapidly in the topography of E. Ky., but very slowly with its people. I fear for the hopelessness of the Appalachian people. I know how coal has played a very big part in all of our lives - I still have coal dust on furniture I brought from my parents' home after my mother died. Your appeal to President Obama SHOULD be paid attention to. I agree the people need hope. Can you answer a question for me that I don't ask in any way but respectfully, though it may come out wrong. My mother was a teacher. Her sister, and three sisters-in-law were teachers. I taught 17 years until cancer and chemo forced me to retire. What is the push on education of children in poverty? I know my parents raised me with the hope I would do better than they did. I've done alright, a college degree and 18 years in the classroom, but what is the desire of the children and their families to pull ahead of their circumstances. What I saw, through youthful eyes, of course, were children who would come over the swinging bridge from the railroad yards to school in Hazard and they did not excel. How is education approached with children in Appalachia today? Is it exhorted as a means to get OUT of the coal and into a career of some other kind? Or do the children merely want to follow in their families footsteps and continue to work in coal? I know there are the 'haves and have nots' in that industry, but have you and yours and others ever been encouraged to seek to rise up and get higher educations so that they CAN choose where and how to live?
Mark you, I am not condemning any stream of thought, but I wonder if there is such a feeling of hopelessness that it drives the ambition of the human spirit so far down that it is hard to rise above it. I know Eastern Kentuckians are proud people and don't like to get handouts, at least that is the way it was when I lived there, but what is the drive going for them?
I am trying to formulate a paper of a general approach to trying to get the American people as a whole to join together, forget partisan politics, and reach out across the boundaries between class distinctions devised according to wealth to help those who need it get the one thing I believe would help them more than anything and that is HOPE. Not wishes blown away in smoke, but grounded in fulfillment of education in whatever career they show promise or desire to pursue. Can you, will you write me back and let me hear your ideas? Grass root movements rarely get started by the ideas of one and certainly cannot go any further without people bonding together to ask the right questions, suggest many possible answers, and then seeking the means. I'm not a flake (though some of my seventh graders of days past would probably say I was) and I am interested in 'getting involved' and what better place than my past home? I look forward to your comments. Thanks. Christina Taulbee DeLaigle