1921

As a West Virginian, this rips my heart out.
They’ve done a damn good job making the right the “Christian” side.
People take their damn religion seriously (usually the leaders, not the text), and when you’re told every single day in an ultra religious community that being accepting of and protecting other religions is the same as a deal with the devil, it is easy to make you serve any master using your indoctrination against you. Every advance for the gays was an advance for Satan too and further solidified the demonization of the left to these people. Not long after 1921, deeply religious rural communities were introduced to an explosion of evangelical leaders and tent revivals whose preachers were all influenced by right wing Christian radio and that shit spread like wildfire. Any social advance was an advance for communism and therefore the devil.
I love my people, and you won’t find a more giving and loving people, but my god are they indoctrinated.
When driving through West “by God” Virginia, you will encounter 15 churches for every dollar general. No shit.
Around 2016 I went to several churches with my uncle, and all but one of them was politicking in the pulpit. ONLY ONE focused on the love of Christ and spiritual growth.
According the people who went to his little church, he just wasn’t “fired up” enough. To me he was the only worthwhile leader there.
I don’t know. I tell people all the time around home that their ancestors fought and died for their rights as workers. They’d all willingly walk into fire before forsaking the religious leaders in the community though.
Another big part of it is that their only source of income is coal. The left wants to end coal use. In all honesty it has starved and destroyed the place because it is so engrained in the culture that no one bothered to look for alternatives. It could have been manufacturing, and West Virginia would gladly accept lower wages than the rest of the US for such work, but it ain’t China cheap. So we’re doomed here. Everyone believes that the only hope is coal because it’s the only place to make a living.
My brother was making 30 bucks and hour when minimum wage was 5.15 (what the rest of us were making with no hope of anything better).
I don’t know. I get worked up thinking about all of this. Especially right now with my hometown under water likely due to climate change. The current flooding is the worst on record, but you can’t convince folks even while they’re drowning.
- Any plan for a Green New Deal has got to include assistance for workers whose jobs will be lost. Lay off the coal miners, pay them the same wage they were making in the mines, and train them for green energy jobs. The government has the money. (Have you seen the military budget?!)
  
  This right here.
  I feel like my people have been left to starve.
  There really is a lot to it and it’s really depressing. It seems like every little thing that stimulates the economy just goes to a new RV for the business class too. Like the Hatfield McCoy Trail. Local businesses are doing better than ever and the owners are living it up, but the people working them are making 8.75 an hour.
  Sucks.
  The neighborhood I grew up in was beautiful. In less than 15 years half of the houses are collapsing including my childhood home.
- Somewhere I heard someone say something like we don't vote for Biden or Trump, we vote for coal. It's hard to convince single-issue voters when that single issue is the only thing they see every day.
  
  The problem is the government doesn't want to help the people who will be out of a job, because that would be a "handout", and everybody knows that handouts are bad. We really have to pull out all the stops and spare no expense to stop this climate catastrophe.
  
  And the problem with the area is that there isn't a good fall back to rely on. And, since the land isn't valuable for commercial farming, people aren't as likely to sell the family farm for opportunities elsewhere.
- Damn dude, that's fucked. I loved going to WV for summer camps as a kid, the wilderness in that state is incredible, but you're absolutely right about the church density and lack of infrastructure.
  Every time I pass through that state, it's always small Americana towns loaded with beautiful architecture and small businesses on the verge of collapse, while the town churches look like new. It's a truly baffling phenomenon until you recognize that Churches provide a lot of the social structure and safety nets for people there.
  And while a lot of their issues can be traced back to the coal-dependence of the state, a lot of it can be traced to regional policy that just left the state behind. WV isn't near dead last in the nation in every category because it wants to be, but damn it all if they aren't doing anything that could help change that. Louisiana is like that too; dead last in everything, with so much squandered potential.
- This breaks my heart.

Fox News is a hell of a drug.
- The anti-union sentiment started well before then.
  
  It mostly started with Reagan in the 80s and was continued by Clinton in the 90s. Both republicans and democrats abandoned unions almost in lock step.
  
  The discussion at hand is a bit more modern, Republicans abandoned unions shortly after the civil rights era.

The strikes were illegal back then, too. They didn't start out armed, and then people started shooting them for striking, and they figured over time that they better arm themselves.

The lesson there is that it will take workers armed to the teeth to take back their rights. Learn or burn kids
- Well when you put it like that, I'd rather learn. I'm not particularly keen on burning kids
  
  Kids are the real clean coal
- Technically, the rights they fought for were given by congress in the later half of the 1930s following widespread peaceful protests.
- Feels like the lesson is if you kill enough labor activists, eventually you'll domesticate the population at large.
  West Virginia didn't just become conservative. It fell to an intense siege played out over generations.

The coming depression and reality of impossible economic conditions will test the limits of propaganda.
Outage and infotainment are the new bread and circuses, but all distractions have their limits in the face of not being able to afford basic necessities.
- If the distraction was only to nake them docile then maybe, but the distraction here is using their unease and anger towards the wrong people and it seems to be working. By the time they "do something" and realize it didn't work and it was a distraction there'll already be a lot of irreparable damage.
- What does that have to do with anything discussed here?

People just don't want to strike anymore.
- Nobody has ever wanted to strike. That's kind of the point. It's a last ditch effort.
  
  (j/k) the joke being it's a satire of the more common saying that makes even less sense: "people don't want to work anymore". Nobody has ever wanted to work. That's kind of the point.
- no they just wanna strike from home over zoom
- I love the duality of this comment

Which side are you on, which side are you on
- They say in Harlan County
  There are no neutrals there
  You're either be a Union man
  Or a thug for J.H. Blair

We're about to find out if hard times create strong men

Just gonna leave this guys rendition of the Chemical Workers Song here. Feels like it compliments this post.
https://youtu.be/XPZwRF7yRAQ

Please seek contact with workers rights groups online or offline. We need to organize, no matter the country. These companies span the globe.
One starting point is !anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com

Literally.

Rednecks finally outnumber the hillbillies

He must mean the 2021 state law that codified a 1990 state supreme court decision that called a teacher strike illegal. But using the actions of a group of coal miners, a state court and a legislature to demonstrate indoctrination seems like a strange comparison. I would compare maybe two public opinion surveys from those years.
- I think he's talking about just how anti union most of the voters and politicians have become in WV. I don't think he's talking abiut any particular event.
  
  I don't think the actions of the WV legislature necessarily reflects voters being anti-union. Lots of MAGA voters are finding out the hard way that the politicians who promised to protect them from socialism or wokeness or whatever don't necessarily GAF about them.

Oh, THAT armed rebellion for "their rights". Yeah. Yeah. That was a good one.
- You know West Virginia only exists because it broke away from Virginia to stay in the Union, right?
  
  Tbh I wasn't sure and too lazy to look up WV's allegiance during the Civil War...still worked for the joke, I think. 😁
  
  Lol. The union wanted our coal for their factories. Don't kid yourself.