Voting Rural? Is That Even Possible?

(This started out as an e-mail reply to a Good Folks newsletter about the author's hopes for "slow activism in rural areas." For those who don't read the Good Folks newsletter, it often promotes the work of writers, artists, and musicians who happen to be "gay." As with any demographic, some of that work also happens to be good, which is the primary reason why people subscribe to the newsletter.)

Must supporting things that matter to rural people, to oneself as a rural person, always mean going Republican? I hope not. It would help if Democrats had more to say about the interests of rural people as distinct from those of rich Eurotrash who want to "preserve resources" by criminalizing rural life. 

Example: Appalachian Power wants to sink money in "a small nuclear reactor" in rural Wise County, Virginia. Wise County is worked-out coalfields, Not only could a nuclear reactor built there not possibly be safe, it would also contaminate drinking water from the Virginia-Kentucky border to New Orleans.

Typical R position: "Youall want jobs, don't you? A small nuclear reactor would create jobs, right?"

When I was young we would have expected the D party to be the ones saying, "Wait a minute. Appalachian Power should first invest in the community by putting solar collectors where people want them, letting those people pay for the collectors and thus keeping them paying APCo for a few more years, and give Wise County and other coalfields counties a chance to export something healthy for once. "

Now look at the Democrats in power. What do they know or care about this kind of thing? They're too busy spouting the line their European owners are feeding them. "Ban guns, ban all aspects of rural life, make Wise County unlivable, tell people we're giving the good land back to the bears as we herd the people into apartment towers in cities where they'll die faster, and get people like Schwab controlling the rural land in the U.S. just as they are in Europe, so they can turn North America back into the kind of mess Europe is." 

I want APCo to give older people like me and my neighbors the "job" of exporting our sunshine. I think of that as a "liberal" idea, and so you may be sure do some big influences in the Republican party. But today's Democrats are too busy screaming about gun bans and abortion being a "right" (for women over 50, yeah RIGHT!) to support anything that actually works for rural people. When they notice that we exist, they're screaming that our existence is racist. (I'm biracial myself, and duh, solar collectors would work for Black home owners too, and did you see anything about their not working for "gays" or Muslims or any other demographic group?...but the Loony Left has apparently decided that just being home owners is "racist." Stay in those housing projects in the slums where you belong, proles! Achievement, freedom, privacy, even good health are racist things for YOU losers even to WANT! Anyway why aren't all these people over 50 dead, as they would be in Europe?)

As a lifelong registered Independent I want what works for me and others like me, and don't care which party picks up those ideas...but it looks as if Terry Kilgore, the hardcore "conservative" Republican, is more likely to be more helpful to rural people here than Democrats like Tim Kaine. 

*****

It's important to note here that I don't hate Europeans. 

I hate the fantasy of "global governance" that makes it possible for people to take political sides in countries where they don't live. There is a Muslim version of that fantasy, but currently the people who subscribe to it and are meddling in U.S. government are Europeans. They're also bigots, and they get their notions about what's "racist" and "anti-Semitic" straight out of their mirrors. They're also sexists and Socialists. The craziest part of their bigotry is that their tribal hate, which is also strong, shifts overnight. Basically they still seem to think of themselves as tiny feuding tribes, not even Hungarians-as-opposed-to-Italians-in-Europe as Huns-as-opposed-to-Magyars-in-Hungary, and they'll be ready to go to war with any other tribe in minutes. I think those Saturday morning cartoons probably got it right. It may be true that "everybody wants to rule the world" in moments of moral weakness, but all people who seriously try to rule the world are villains, and detestable.

Ordinary sane Europeans who come here as visitors, your typical exchange student, exchange teacher, diplomat, tourist, etc., I've almost always liked. Their history is instructive, and their cultural traditions of art, literature, architecture, and so on, such as have survived their wars, are impressive. As individual people they usually seem pleasant to know and interesting to talk to. The world needs no more bigotry and no more war. 

The more advanced civilizations on this continent do, however, need to remain aware of and consistently beat back any further incursions of the toxic European ideas our ancestors left behind. There ought to be a specific name for those ideas, more specific than "tyranny" or "totalitarianism" or "bigotry" or "warmongering" or "elitism," although those words usually apply to the specific bad ideas as they appear, and ideally more separable from any idea of people than "European," although I think it is helpful to note where the toxic ideas are coming from. It would be helpful if the people promulgating these bad ideas all belonged to one party, whose name would then be the proper name for the bad ideas. 

Until a better name suggests itself, this web site is stuck with "European" as the name for the most toxic ideas floating around these days. When talking about people, books, music, etc., which we usually do in a favorable way, usually it's possible to identify them with specific countries that happen to be in Europe. And we will be talking favorably about British, Swedish, Greek, German, Ukrainian, etc., etc., people and their work, because, loathsome as these European political ideas are, we have nothing against the plain people of Europe. 

Morgan Griffith's Office Hours

One year, this web site received and posted Congressman Griffith's "Travelling Office Hours" for the month of July, in response to some Tea Party types who sent out e-mails asking people "Where's your Congressman?" We've not done this every year. We will, however, note that residents of Scott and Wise Counties who want to talk live to someone from our Congressman's office still have time to do that.

"

July 19, 2016

Carroll County:   10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Carroll County Administration Building
Board of Supervisors Room
605 – 1 Pine Street
Hillsville, VA

Floyd County:   2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Floyd Town Hall
134 Wilson Street
Floyd, VA

July 20, 2016

Henry County:   10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Bassett Historical Society
3964 Fairystone Parkway
Bassett, VA

Bland County:   10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Bland County Courthouse
Admin. Office Room 200
612 Main Street
Bland, VA

Wythe County:   2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Wythe County Sheriff’s Office
Conference Room
245 South 4th Street
Wytheville, VA

Patrick County:   2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Patrick County Administration Building
Conference Room
106 Rucker Street
Stuart, VA

July 21, 2016

Alleghany County:   10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Clifton Forge Library
Conference Room
535 Church Street
Clifton Forge, VA

Scott County:   10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Community Services Building
Community Room
190 Beech Street
Gate City, VA

Roanoke County:   2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Roanoke Library Hollins Branch
6624 Peters Creek Road
Roanoke, VA

Wise County:   2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Big Stone Gap Federal Courthouse
3rd Floor Room 303
322 Wood Avenue E
Big Stone Gap, VA

** Please contact the Christiansburg Office at 540-381-5671 

or the Abingdon Office at 276-525-1405 with any questions.

"

Book/Record Reaction: Music of Coal

Reading and Listening to Music of Coal

        
Author/producer: Jack Wright 

Date: 2007 

Publisher: Lonesome Pine Office on Youth (www.lpoy.org)

ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

Length: 68 pages (book), over 2 hours (recorded music)

Quote: “Few occupational traditions...have inspired more songs than coal.”)

        
Music of Coal was one new album of music I wanted to listen to, and review, when it came out. I didn’t, because the music was published on CD’s only. I bought LPs and LP players, cassettes and cassette players, and then I took a vow that I wasn’t going to spend any more money on yet another musical gimmick whose manufacturer wouldn’t even be able to make routine repairs on the thing ten years later. So I had to wait for someone whose new car came with a CD player to find this album and share it with a car pool, while we were driving through some of the scenery photographed in the book. It was quite a thought-provoking experience.

        
This document was meant to inform readers and listeners more than to entertain them. Two hours of coal mine songs, many of which were written to report bad news, can become depressing. Some of the songs were written by miners who say they like their jobs; probably most of them mean they like being able to live close to their rural roots, but Merle Travis famously had another explanation: “It will form as a habit...like a drunkard his wine, a man will have lust for the lure of the mine.” 

        
Here are the thoughts I noted while reading and listening:

       
1. The album begins with “Down in a coal mine, underneath the ground,” and mentions that this was a British song that came to the U.S. via vaudeville theatre. The version on the album was performed by the Edison Orchestra, as a march, and includes only the chorus (there were five verses). Coal mine bosses were known to have organized brass bands, which presumably would have imitated this performance, but the record doesn’t include any of them.

        
2. A picture of Lancashire pit lasses does not belong next to the song by Sara and Maybelle Carter. Women had no place in the Virginia mines until the 1970s, when some women imagined that working in coal mines would be “liberating.” Originally the intention of banning all females from all coal mines was to end the abuse of women and children, as documented in British coal mines, where smaller workers were sometimes wanted but were expected to work harder for lower wages. As mining became more mechanized, some bosses continued to refuse to hire women out of fear that sooner or later some male laborer would make either a joke or a flirtatious “pass” at a woman, who would claim to have been insulted, and there’d be a fight. There are legends of cross-dressing women who worked in Virginia coal mines in the early twentieth century; I have not seen documentation.

        
3. Nimrod Workman claimed that water seeped into the mine and “I...come outside and my clothes would be wet...and they would freeze into ice. My wife would build up a fire and it would take me a time to get my clothes thawed up to where I could get them off.” Is this possible? Yes. Coal miners adapted to constant 55-degree damp by wearing lots of layers. If the inside layers of clothing are thick and sturdy, the outside layers can freeze without the person being frostbitten. Kentucky, like Virginia, does have days like that, though not in every year.

        
4. All coal miners were black; according to photos some of the coal camps were so well integrated that it’s hard to tell which miners were Black, underneath the coal dust, and which were White. There are practically no African-Americans in coal communities today. I once commented on this to one of the older generation in Appalachia and was told, “There used to be some Black people around here. I suppose they’ve all moved away...don’t remember the last time I saw any of them.”

5. A photo-op showing Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly greeting a miner, whose face looks black, is interesting. FDR is beaming and reaching out to shake someone’s hand. So is the miner. They do not, however, appear to be reaching toward each other’s hands.

        
6. Apart from the vintage of the cars in a picture from about 1950, Main Street in Appalachia hasn’t changed much.

        
7. Around her 70^th birthday, Jean Ritchie’s voice had only grown higher and sweeter than ever. Her rendition of “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Any More” was still fine.

        
8. Many early coal mining songs were composed, sung, and sponsored by the unions, which later became as corrupt as the bosses the unions had been formed to fight. Some unions were led by Socialists and, while their party was overt and legal, by Communists. Sure enough, this album contains a song in which folk singers attempt, without much success, to berate “the dirty capitalist system” in two-part harmony. Nobody's heard that on the radio.

        
9. The photo of the widow and four orphans Fisher, of Kentucky, taken after Tommy Fisher and 24 other men died in 1943, will remind some readers of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Were their eyes all dilated by some drug they’d been given “for the shock”? Did someone poke holes in the original snapshot with a pin?

        
10. Carter Stanley’s performance of “Daddy Don’t Go to the Mines” is here remixed with harmony by his daughter, Jeannie, who was four years old when he died. You can tell she’s spent a lot of time singing along with the records he left her.

        
11. The car in which I was listening to the CD's passed the ruins of a settlement called Derby. According to this book, it was the site of an explosion in 1934; seventeen miners dead, 74 trapped underground for hours (they nearly had to swim out). A broadside verse was composed shortly afterward, but not recorded until 2006. A note on a copy of the lyrics said that it was composed to the tune “Picture on the Wall.” I never heard the story or the song. A major news event in Wise County was not necessarily of much interest in Scott County. This has not changed.

        
12. Billy Edd Wheeler claims that he’s seldom able to sing his song of coal-camp nostalgia: “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home, but I’m not going back soon...The town’s all gone, it’s gone away. The people are straw the wind has blown away...How could anybody know that the next year or so, We would all be traveling over mountain and plain, Tryin’ to plant our roots again.” The coal camps have disappeared. A friend of my mother’s, one of the lucky coal-camp children who’d married well and found something better than the Bonny Blue coal camp where she was born, wanted to show Mother where she’d grown up; they weren’t even allowed to drive past the site of her home. 

        
13. Ron Short claims that in West Virginia miners who wore red bandanas, who fought in an armed rebellion against mine “operators” and eventually federal troops, were called “rednecks” and made that name a term of pride. I never heard that story either.

        
14. “Sixteen Tons” was first recorded by Merle Travis, then made a hit by Ernie Ford, but on this record it’s performed by some youngster called Ned Beatty. His version passes over the original first verse, “Some people say a man is made out of mud. A poor man is made out of muscle and blood,” to focus on the reason why a Gate City man might have to take a job in a mine: “I was born one mornin’ it was drizzlin’ rain. Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name.” In communities closer to the mines, a coal mine might have been among the first places a young man looked for a job, but in my home town the mines were where a man went if he was really desperate...as it might be because he had a record for "fightin' and trouble."

        
15. By and large the book that accompanies the albums manages to remember that Appalachia is one town, and there are others. Nevertheless, on page 51: “A.J. Roach...speaks from his roots in Appalachia. Raised in the hollows of Scott County, Virginia...” Appalachia is in Wise County.

        
16. A.J. Roach’s song is entitled “Black Lung.” It makes me wonder why no miner photographed in work gear, in this book, has a face mask. 

        
17. And I’m not sure in what part of Scott County A.J. Roach’s grandfather “was—like most men in my area of Virginia—a coal miner.” Wise and Lee County men were coal miners. Scott County had an active coal mine in the early half of the twentieth century, but even while it existed that mine never employed most of the men even in one town. Roach is not a Gate City name so my guess would be that this grandfather lived somewhere closer to the coal mines. Possibly he was from Appalachia.

        
18. In 1992, deep in a mine outside Norton, some idiot lighted a cigarette. “Many of his co-workers might have survived if that small explosion hadn’t kicked up a  cloud of coal dust that also ignited...and the fireball that developed spread to every part of the mine at about 600 m.p.h...Coal companies are cited for dust violations far more often than any other problem.” Hmph. What about violations of laws against smoking in other people’s place of employment?!

        
19. Some kid from East Tennessee State University made up a song about a disaster in the Coeburn mine: “Twenty men saw their Maker’s face.” There was no disaster in the Coeburn mine. The compilers of this album wanted the song, and apparently were able to get it cheaper than either of the authentic versions of “Sixteen Tons,” so they went to the trouble of digging up the detail that another mine, “about three miles from Coeburn,” had two explosions, in 1907 and 1910, and a total of nineteen miners were killed. Hmph, again.

        

20. Between 2005, when Jack Wright and friends started compiling this book and record, and 2007, when Music of Coal was published, 64 miners died in the U.S. alone. In China, it was reported that 4746 miners died in 2006 alone. There is still (although that song is not included in this collection) blood on the coal.

As documented in this collection, some people still work in coal mines, and still want to. Some people speculate, "They wouldn't do well in other jobs." Some coal miners have, like our inactive member Adayahi, done quite well in other jobs. There are no easy answers, but this collection may provide as much emotional insight into the situation as most of us are ever going to get. People who belong here will do, and do without, a lot of things in order to stay here.

Music of Coal was originally sold as a fundraiser for charity, and its value has gone up not down since its release. This web site will offer it as a Fair Trade Book (with CD's). The best price we can offer will be $80 for the set + $5 for shipping, and if you send that amount to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com we'll send the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth $8.50. 

Phenology: Bill Carrico on the Snow Emergency

As this web site has mentioned before, whenever Virginia sees anything remotely resembling what Northerners call winter weather, we call it a disaster--and it is, because we don't get this kind of weather every year, and are not prepared.

Gate City got up to six inches of powder last week, then six inches of wet snow (more fell, but it melted and packed down) on Saturday, then another inch or two of powder early Monday morning. Not bad--unless you were trying to drive on a back road, where slippery powder snow concealed a treacherous crust of ice. I didn't even want to walk out and see the inevitable idjits trying to drive under these conditions. I took two snow days at home and was, frankly, cozy. This is, after all, the kind of thing people in the Northern States expect to live with for one-quarter of the year, and in other places where this web site is read "winter weather" is usually worse than this.

Winter weather is usually more severe in Wise County than in Scott County. Higher mountains; rougher back roads. Wendy Welch described the situation in downtown Big Stone Gap as pleasant, with people finally putting those four-wheel nuisance vehicles to good use...but one person's jolly snow party is usually another person's snow disaster.

From Virginia State Senator Bill Carrico:

"CARRICO ISSUES STATEMENT ON STATE OF EMERGENCY IN WISE, LEE & DICKENSON COUNTIES

Richmond - Sen. Bill Carrico (R-Grayson County) issued the following statement today concerning the ongoing states of emergency in the Southwest Virginia counties of Wise, Lee and Dickenson:

"My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Wise, Lee and Dickenson counties as they continue to endure brutal weather conditions that have led to widespread damage and dangerous scenarios for many residents.  I want to assure them that we are working hard to ensure that all available state resources are leveraged to their full potential for the affected counties.  I would like to commend the first responders, local leaders, the National Guard, and the state agencies and officials who are working tirelessly to help manage the situation.  My office will continue to do the same, and we pray that weather conditions will improve in the very near future."

Wise, Lee and Dickenson counties have declared states of emergency after more than two feet of snow accumulated last week, with potentially more in the forecast.  Widespread damage is occurring to businesses and residences, along with power and water outages and transportation concerns.  The National Guard is in Wise County to assist in the damage clean-up and help county officials prepare for any additional accumulation.  In the county alone, officials estimate damage there to be millions of dollars in damage.

Individuals with storm damage to report are encouraged to call 276-328-2321. "

To which this web site adds: Youall know I don't have a lot to offer, but if anybody in Wise County has become temporarily homeless as a result of all this snow, their friends who have Internet access may Twitter @5PriscillaKing . (I'll even lean on people whose spare bedrooms have electricity.)

Morgan Griffith on National Forest Land

More from Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter:

"

Trees for Schools – An Update

Over a century ago, the federal government promised rural communities that it would actively manage forest land to the communities’ benefit, historically sharing around 25 percent of revenues from timber harvests with rural counties that contain National Forest Land.  This money could be used in lieu of revenue these communities might otherwise have received from property taxes if the land were not owned by the federal government, and could be used to fund schools, teachers, police officers, etc.  Recipients of these funds within the Ninth District of Virginia include the following counties: Alleghany, Bland, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Giles, Grayson, Lee, Montgomery, Pulaski, Roanoke, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise, and Wythe.

Due to federal regulations and environmental lawsuits, however, the Forest Service over the years has reduced the amount of federal forest land being timbered.  In my opinion, this not only has destroyed jobs and deprived rural communities of needed revenue, but also is poor forest management, making the land more susceptible to invasive species and wildfires.  Tragically, the House Natural Resources Committee states that wildfires burned 9.3 million acres last year alone.

Badly needed is a long-term solution to improve forest health and management, fulfill the federal government’s promise to rural communities, and grow jobs.  To that end, the House Natural Resources Committee over the last several months has worked to advance H.R. 1526, the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act.  This legislation would promote responsible timber production, improve state and local involvement, and restore the federal government’s commitment to rural communities.  This should mean more money for Southwest Virginia localities.

I am an original cosponsor of this legislation, which recently passed the House with my support.  Similar legislation recently passed the Senate.  I will continue monitoring the progress of this legislation, and working to promote healthier forests and get residents of the Ninth District’s rural communities back to work.

As always, if you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671.  To reach my office by email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov."

Comment from PK: Do I have questions and concerns? Mercy. I have so many questions and concerns that I can't see any way to learn enough to make an intelligent comment. Will other Virginians please, please, please pick up this one?

Morgan Griffith Shares Survey Results

Fair disclosure: I'm not the correspondent from Gate City cited below. I received a survey by real mail in time to fill it out, but didn't mail it back in time for it to show up on Congressman Griffith's web site, as discussed in his e-newsletter:

"Late in 2012 and early this year, my office sent surveys to many throughout the Ninth District seeking feedback on legislative issues. I am pleased to report that we received more than 16,000 responses to these surveys. The results of the survey have been posted here on my website for your review.

Some of the more than 16,000 responses agreed with my positions, others differed, and many contained individual, hand-written feedback that included criticisms, compliments, frustrations, prayers, or questions. Here are just some of the interesting hand-written comments:

• From Wise: “Remember that Southwest VA doesn’t end in Abingdon, VA. The coal mines help a lot of our families.”

• From Bland: “Why does Obama get millions of dollars for vacations on our taxes and borrowed money when I haven’t had a vacation in years? But yet our taxes keep going up along with everything else. Makes no sense to me.”

• From Max Meadows: “Will this survey have any effect as to what Congress decides? Doubtful!!!”

• From Bristol: “[Representative] Hoyer says ‘spending does not cause debt.’ Where is all this debt coming from. Maybe terrorists are shipping it in from overseas.”

• From Martinsville: “We consider North Korea to be of more danger [than] Iran.”

• From Riner: “Being the victims of an attempted home invasion with a man with a gun, we would not be alive if I did not own a gun to defend my home and life with. I think citizens should be able to vote on proposals by OUR government.”

• From Gate City: “I do not have e-mail. The cost of cable and internet is too high. Power bills are extremely high; also fuel costs. Our elderly people cannot afford these bills, and this does not count health care. Please keep me informed by mail.”

I try to listen to my constituents’ concerns, wants, and needs, and value all feedback from residents of the Ninth District. If you would like to submit your feedback on these issues or any other, I invite you to do so at www.morgangriffith.house.gov .
"

More Opposition to Crooked Road Heritage Area

Dear Correspondents, can you guess why Yahoo misfiled Catherine Turner's e-mail, below, as spam? (Probably not, unless you've seen the e-mail or the flyer printed from it.)

"February 28, 2013

CAUTION! REALITY CHECK FOR The Crooked Road:

Fifteen SWVA Agricultural Assn. Member Counties REJECT The Crooked Road National Heritage Area Designation...see attached

The VA Farm Bureau tells Congressman Morgan Griffith: WE REJECT THE NHA!...see attached

Wythe County Commissioners Unanimously Reject the NHA Designation

Town Council of Rural Retreat Unanimously Reject the NHA Designation,

Tues. February 26, 2013

Excerpt from email, Executive Director, The Crooked Road, Jack Hinshelwood, December 17, 2012:

As we have stated before, a Crooked Road NHA would do just two things – give this region’s heritage music a well deserved national recognition, and make us eligible for possible federal funding to promote the region’s music. It is that simple. It would not in any way convey local governmental authority to The Crooked Road. Nor would local governmental authority be conveyed in any way to the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior – a fact confirmed by 13 county officials in three heritage areas in three neighboring states.

-----------------------------------------------

'give this region’s heritage music a well deserved national recognition...'

Our response:

We believe that our heritage music pre-dated The Crooked Road's marketing efforts, and its future success should not in any way involve the National Park Service by imposing a boundary around nineteen SWVA counties.

'...make us eligible for possible federal funding...Nor would local governmental authority be conveyed in any way to the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior'

Tell that to the National Park Service, Mr. Hinshelwood! Since the NHA will be 50% funded by the NPS, we're pretty sure The Crooked Road will be playing by the Secretary of the Interior's rules:

http://www.nps.gov/heritageareas/REP/Notebook.pdf

The management plan also links the local coordinating entity [The Crooked Road Board] to federal funding and broadly sets forth how federal and other monies are to be spent over time. The management planning process must be completed in three years, as stated in the authorizing legislation, and include National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) processes and documentation in order for the Secretary of the Interior to sign the plan. Without the Secretary’s signature, a heritage area cannot receive further federal funding. (NEPA and NHPA outline planning and consultation processes which can be integrated into the management planning process and are explained below.)

'...Nor would local governmental authority be conveyed in any way to the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior – a fact confirmed by 13 county officials in three heritage areas in three neighboring states.'

We don't know who Mr. Hinshelwood's "thirteen county officials" are, but we have documented THOUSANDS of victims of property rights abuses as a result of Heritage Area management plans in our NHA Newsletter, 2nd Edition (see both issues, attached) including Heritage Areas in neighboring states.

For more information, contact: 276-274-8304

The Southwest Virginia Tea Party, Abingdon/Bristol/WashCo

www.swvateapartyab.org "

Why wouldn't this document have reached me until today, when I thought "Since the General Assembly have voted on legislation for this year, there's time to check the spam file," if it had been e-mailed three weeks ago? Links and attachments usually don't snag documents in the spam filter, although the computers I use often fail to open them, or, in the case of PDF documents, take more time to process them than I have. This document was filed as SPAM because it contained...a graphic. A picture of a road sign saying "Proceed With Caution." Apparently Google doesn't like the picture either, because it failed to paste into this document with the rest of the press release, but I assure you there's nothing offensive about it. You've seen similar signs on the road.  

Proceed with caution when e-mailing pictures, Gentle Readers.  

The fifteen counties that have rejected the National Heritage Area designation are: Bland, Buchanan, Carroll, Dickenson, Giles, Grayson, Lee, Pulaski, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise, and Wythe.  

So far as I know, everybody in these counties, without exception, loves tourists. And music. And music festivals. And parks. And scenery. Also crafts, bed-and-breakfasts, antique car shows, pick-your-own-fruit fields, and other things The Crooked Road has attempted to market. We just don't see a necessary connection between any of these things and a proposed land grab by a federal government careening toward bankruptcy and likely to sell the land it has grabbed to foreign interests.

Local Opposition to the Crooked Road

From Catherine Turner:

 

Washington County Supervisor Bill Gibson, Russell County Supervisor Bob Gibson, Smyth County Supervisor Ron Blevins and Washington County Planning Commissioner Charlie Hargis--all outspoken opponents-- will join Steve Hawkins on WFHG 92.9 SuperTalk on Monday morning, February 25th at 7:30AM for a lively discussion on the proposed Crooked Road National Heritage Area designation, currently supported by Congressman Morgan Griffith and Senator Mark Warner.

The group will discuss the growing list of opponents which includes Senator Bill Carrico, Delegate Terry Kilgore (who chairs the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Foundation, the "parent" organization of The Crooked Road and Heartwood Artisan Center), Delegate Israel O'Quinn, Delegate Nick Rush, Delegate Annie Crocket-Stark, Delegate Joe Johnson, and Delegate Will Morefield.

___________________________________

For more information, contact: 276-274-8304

The Southwest Virginia Tea Party, Abingdon/Bristol/WashCo

www.swvateapartyab.org

NHA Newsletter, 1st Edition

NHA Newsletter, 2nd Edition