 You're being lied to about coal mining jobs. See coal mining is one of the unhappiest, unhealthiest professions in the country. Yet coal miners can't picture a life without it. When I graduated to high school, it was did coal sell dope join the Army. And I chose the military. And today, 35 years later, it's still did coal sell dope join the Army. There's just a lot of history here, man. The American coal industry, as we know it, first took off in the mid-1800s when prospectors began scouring at Appalachia for land with coal beneath it. There's one story of a dude down in West Virginia giving up his land rights to prospectors in exchange for a dozen hogs and 13 rifles. I gotta say, I want to scoff at the dude, but I bet my great-great-grandpappy would have taken that deal too. A bunch of rocky-ass land ain't cool. You know what's cool? A dozen hogs and 13 rifles. Coal thrived in the early 1900s. Just like flappers and those bikes with the really big front wheel, America was doing big things, building railroads and factories, and coal country was the fiery furnace that fueled the Industrial Revolution. It also led to the construction of literal coal mining towns and hundreds of communities that are still around today. Some might call these the glory days of coal, but it wasn't too glorious for the folks actually digging up those chunks of black gold. If you weren't getting crushed to death in a mineshaft or coating your lungs in a fine layer of coal dust, you might have been getting shot or beat down by strike breakers. Yeah, see, eventually miners got hip to the fact that everybody was getting rich off of coal except for the folks actually mining it. About 70% of their salary was paid in, basically fake money that said Amherstel Coal Company, and you could only use that money at the company store, and then they raised the prices on milk, eggs, cheese, things of that nature, and it kept the people basically impoverished. Consider the Battle of Blair Mountain. Miners engaged in a series of armed skirmishes with mining company security guards. It was a brave and noble fight that eventually ended with federal troops stepping in. In the end, the union was even weaker than it was when they started, and like I said, those were the good old days. Coal industry employment peaked in the early 1920s and has been on a steady decline ever since. That's right, coal has been a dying industry for a hundred years, and yet some politicians are still promising that it will make an improbable return to glory. I can't really judge anybody for believing in this false hope, but after all, I'm a Tennessee football fan. There ain't really much to positively associate with the coal industry right about now. While conditions have improved somewhat, folks in coal country earn less and are less likely to be employed than the average American. And while coal employment continues to plummet through the center of the earth, the industry is pursuing even more environmentally sadistic means of extracting coal. These days, the job is done mostly by blowing the tops off of mountains and redistributing the debris in nearby valleys and streams. This is a process that's caused so much documented harm to humans and the environment that I am frankly appalled that Mark Ruffalo ain't starring in a movie about it. Come on, Hulk, where you at? Anyway, it's not like we need to convince coal country that mining is a dangerous and dying industry. They know it way better than you and me, and they got the calloused hands, blackened lungs, and broken backs to prove it. It's just that the alternatives aren't any better. It kind of explains why West Virginia, once a blue state, went all in on Trump in 2016. People at least appreciated the vague gesture in the general direction of their humanity. So it should be simple, right? We'll just get a politician in a smart pantsuit to inform the hillbillies that tech jobs are the future and we'll create a new Silicon Valley in Appalachia. What kind of apps you guys think would come out of that? About like a goober. It's like Uber, but you ride in the bed of a pickup. How about this? This app's called Reunion. It's a dating app where you can meet your sister or cousin. It's not a pitch, but can we call it incestry.com? Well, scrap that fantasy, because it ain't happening. But this still leaves us with the question of how to address the ills of coal country without, you know, lying to people. Folks like West Virginia politician Richard O'Jether are pretty jazzed up about this whole green new deal business, which would bring clean energy gigs to coal country. Though Jetta is a former Trump voter himself, so there's at least a chance that an ambitious plan like this could reach across the aisle. You know, we can build cars, we can build solar plants, we can do whatever you want. You know, most coal miners are either electricians, welders, equipment operators, or mechanics. Those jobs can transition to other things, but we don't have them here. So if the green new deal has the capability to bring those type of jobs here so that those people can do that, I am for that wholeheartedly. In the meantime, might I suggest you put yourself in the miners' boots? Just imagine if your family had lived in the same town and had worked in the same mine for generations, and you were raised on the firm belief that you would be able to take up that same line of work too. Then imagine that promise of carrying on family tradition while earning a decent wage vanishes. Then folks who have never been to your hometown tell you to suck it up and go find a new job halfway across the country, or learn a new trade that is the opposite of what your family has done and has no guarantee of success. If you suddenly feel your blood pressure rising or a sinking feeling of despair, congratulations. You now have a better understanding of what it's like to live in coal country.