Yet his fiercest critics may say that Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance’s personal history is certainly compelling. He grew up in underprivileged, small-town America amid chemical abuse, absent kids, and a general lack of opportunity with an overall lack of hope. His culture, according to his 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was” an Ohio material town that has been hemorrhaging work and wish for as long as I may remember.”
In Ohio and beyond, areas that were once growing, self-sustaining, and encouraging colony are now struggling with some work and fewer reasons to stay around.
When LSU quarterback Joe Burrow won the Heisman prize in 2019, he burst out in tears while describing his home in southeast Ohio, which he noted was” a very impoverished region and the poverty level is almost twice the national regular.” I’m up here for all those kids in Athens and Athens County who come home after school with little food on the table and are hungry because there are so many people there who do n’t have much.
For Vance, Burrow, and anyone else who grew up in these instances, it was not always this way. ” Bad” parts are not made, they are allowed.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ohio had 1, 155 fuel mine with more than 50, 000 coal miners. By 2003, there were seven mine and just 2, 000 mining work — individual reduces of 99 cent and 96 percent. Keep in mind, we do not use any less fuel. Worldwide petroleum demand continues to increase. Simply America’s share in the coal business, America’s piece of coal dessert, is smaller. We were once the world’s largest producer of fuel, but we are now third, also behind China.
Apparently, in some natural measure or eco-metric, buying fuel from Americans may be negative for the environment, but buying fuel from China or Indonesia is appropriate. Buying coal from miners in Ohio, where we have an Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ), safety standards, paid time off, health care, and labor unions is bad for the environment and causes climate change. Buying fuel from Indonesia, where none of those exist, is apparently “green”.
In 2020, what seems like a life back in today’s political climate, a businessman named Tom Steyer ran for president on a weather system. No fossil energy. Climate panic. Strong success, Joe Burrow and fuel workers. Steyer’s wall account, Farallon Capital, had hundreds of millions invested in Chinese and Indonesian fuel. Steyer may be damned if Ohio’s coal miners could find employment, but he was completely happy with electronic slave labor in Southeast Asia. For the Earth, or anything.
For efficient hypocritical opportunism contributes to the creation of poor towns, along with the climate hysteria perpetuated by elites like John Kerry. They are supported by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, who has contributed more than$ 1 billion to a campaign to shut down every coal plant in America. These people are never destroying their own neighborhoods or putting their relatives in poverty. Nantucket and Manhattan are secure. No, Appalachia is the region that bears the most of their focus. However, Appalachia might soon be in the business of having its own president a rhythm away.
J. D. Vance’s endowed mind and pen escaped through the Marines. Joe Burrow escaped through sport. But for the many who also live there, there is no exit.
When the plant, herb, or machine shut, the profit for the entire neighborhood vanishes, and people are stuck. Their house is typically their biggest and most valuable asset because there are no buyers willing to buy it, which means they cannot sell it. Businesses that have no customers often fail. Downtown empty out. Systemic poverty follows, and with it the worst of the human condition: depression, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide.
These small towns are the hardest hit by the opioid crisis. What else do you do when you have nothing, not even hope? You drown the sorrow in the cheapest, strongest substance you can find.
And the rest of America forgets you, dismissed and sneered at as flyover country, hicks, white trash, or inbreds. As comedian Bill Maher said in one obnoxious monologue,” We have chef Wolfgang Puck, they have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels, theirs have last year’s Christmas lights”.
Poverty is easy to overlook and laugh at, too. ” Learn to code” is an easy dismissal, as President Biden and others have suggested. But the poverty in these towns is not accidental or self-inflicted. People like Tom Steyer promoted selfish, evil policies under the guise of” climate change” to make money in Southeast Asia. This contributed to the poverty.
The policies were pushed under the false promise of libertarian economics, that the market would solve everything, that it is OK to give tax breaks for companies to send jobs overseas because that is the “free market at work”, even though left behind are people, American people, families, children, forced into a growing class of working poor.
As I launched my nonprofit, Power The Future, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy served as a source of inspiration for the millions of Americans who have been abandoned by foolish choices about avoiding global warming or free markets. One of their own is Vance.
The focus of Power The Future, the heart and soul of our mission advocating for American energy, is the energy workers themselves. Yes, energy is everything — our national economy and foreign policy — but it all begins in small-town America, where energy workers live and breathe, and they, perhaps for the first time, have one of their own on the national stage.
Now this cause has a spokesman and champion of its own, and I could not be more excited about the future of the energy industry, the future of America’s economy, the future of foreign policy, because energy is everything, and energy now has a new face, one of us, with dirty hands and clean soul, to borrow a line from the late, great Toby Keith.
J. D. Vance has elevated a small-town boy on the presidential ticket, setting the stage for the carnage of America’s small towns and rebuilding their once-forgotten neighborhoods.
Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that fights for American energy jobs, is the founder and executive director of Daniel Turner. Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture .com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF.
