Last night I got to some good stuff in the book For Common Things, by Jedediah Purdy. He says “every decision in law and politics is a decision about what we will become.” This statement is so self-evident it’s scary. Of course it’s true, but we often act as though it is not. His entire book is an argument for more engagement, more responsibility in the world we live in, and for less irony, detachment, and indifference. Yes. How can one argue with that?

I have come to the conclusion–late–that we have here in WV no culture of enforcement. So, our decisions in law and politics are perhaps only a wish about what we will become. Why are we not following through? Our problems are endemic. If there truly is an Appalachian fatalism–if this personality trait is not limited to the coalfields where residents have good cause for fatalistic thinking, having had little control over their own lands and economy for a hundred years–where did it come from? It must be organic, seeded from this specific place and these conditions, but not from these people, who originally came to do what other frontier people were doing in Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. What makes West Virginia a failed place?

I believe it was the writer Lee Smith who said that as a child, she didn’t know she was from Appalachia, that terrible place of poverty. Appalachia was an other world, not hers.

Is there any reason to think that the future won’t be as ruinous as the past has been? A German firm just bought our water company. Coal companies are leaving us surrounded with eroding plains of rubble. The relatively few taxpayers here help to pay for worker’s compensation funds that are left short by evasions of mining companies.

It seems as if every arm of government and law is on the side of the corporations, not the citizens. Stay tuned.