Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt...

I’m reading Chris Hedges’ and Joe Sacco’s new book, Days of Devastation, Days of Revolt, and I am engrossed. It is tremendously well done. It doesn’t tell me a thing I don’t know about the “sacrifice zone” and the strip mining of the American citizenry. It does tell it in a clear, concise, direct, human and compassionate way. It is moving to read and not overly emotional or polemic. I agree that the only response is revolt.

Here’s a piece from the book as Julian Martin, a seventy-four year old retired school teacher and son of a coal miner tells his story about his southern West Virginia homeland.

“…They were plenty smart. But the highly talented, creative people have been sucked out of the Appalachians.

“It’s a sacrifice zone,” he says:

It’s so the rest of the country can have electric toothbrushes and leave the lights on all night in parking lots for used cars and banks lit up all night long and shit like that. We have been a national sacrifice zone. Hell, that phrase was created thirty-five, forty years ago. Now it’s terminal. There’s no way to stop it. I haven’t had any hope for a long time. But the only reason I keep goin’ is, why the hell not? I’m goin’ die. Shit might as well hold my head up. I don’t want Bill Raney, the president of the [West Virginia] Coal Association, to be able to tell his lies without somebody saying, “Bill, shit, that’s not true.”

These corporations are goin’ to strip the whole country. If you face this reality you become a guerilla. You blow up the damn thing. I can’t go there, because they will put me in the penitentiary, and I don’t want to go there. I know they would catch me eventually.”  Hedges and Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Nation Books