Awaiting Trump's coal comeback, miners reject retraining

[IceSpear]

I like to believe that people are smart enough to know that believe that coal isn't coming back, but living in a world of alternative facts can make people desperate for jobs go for what would seem to be salvation when it is just false hope. _{Notice that I avoided demeaning coal miners, Ice Spear}

You're not telling me anything I don't know. We all deal with wishful thinking and false hope in our lives. That doesn't give you an excuse to permanently live in a fictional reality though, much less blame blacks/browns/gays/women/Muslims for all your problems.

And I don't see how it's "demeaning" to say that someone doesn't know their own best interests when stories like this prove it.

[The Mikado]

It is a bit ridiculous to go up to a 50-something-year-old who has never done anything other than coal mining and say "why don't you take up coding?" The economic hardship of resuming schooling immediately after losing your job is stunning and people are being asked to transition into jobs that are totally out of their skillset or comfort zone.

[Brittain33]

It is a bit ridiculous to go up to a 50-something-year-old who has never done anything other than coal mining and say "why don't you take up coding?" The economic hardship of resuming schooling immediately after losing your job is stunning and people are being asked to transition into jobs that are totally out of their skillset or comfort zone.

True, but this guy is only 33 years old. In my mid-30s I pushed the reset button on my career. It was hard but doable.

[publicunofficial]

I like to believe that people are smart enough to know that believe that coal isn't coming back, but living in a world of alternative facts can make people desperate for jobs go for what would seem to be salvation when it is just false hope. _{Notice that I avoided demeaning coal miners, Ice Spear}

You're not telling me anything I don't know. We all deal with wishful thinking and false hope in our lives. That doesn't give you an excuse to permanently live in a fictional reality though, much less blame blacks/browns/gays/women/Muslims for all your problems.

And I don't see how it's "demeaning" to say that someone doesn't know their own best interests when stories like this prove it.

Government works best when you have nothing but complete and utter contempt for the people you're supposed to be helping.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It is a bit ridiculous to go up to a 50-something-year-old who has never done anything other than coal mining and say "why don't you take up coding?" The economic hardship of resuming schooling immediately after losing your job is stunning and people are being asked to transition into jobs that are totally out of their skillset or comfort zone.

True, but this guy is only 33 years old. In my mid-30s I pushed the reset button on my career. It was hard but doable.

You likely had a specific idea of what you wanted to do and expectations you'd be able to do it and not move from where you wanted to live.

[7,052,770]

Coal miners should all be placed on permanent social security early so there's no pressure to learn a new field if they feel too old for something like that.

Considering the kinds of Medicare costs they end up having, it's the fiscally conservative solution.

[ProudModerate2]

It takes a truly evil group like the Republican party to cash in on these people's hopes and dreams for political gain while defrauding them year after year. It's truly sickening.

[IceSpear]

I like to believe that people are smart enough to know that believe that coal isn't coming back, but living in a world of alternative facts can make people desperate for jobs go for what would seem to be salvation when it is just false hope. _{Notice that I avoided demeaning coal miners, Ice Spear}

You're not telling me anything I don't know. We all deal with wishful thinking and false hope in our lives. That doesn't give you an excuse to permanently live in a fictional reality though, much less blame blacks/browns/gays/women/Muslims for all your problems.

And I don't see how it's "demeaning" to say that someone doesn't know their own best interests when stories like this prove it.

Government works best when you have nothing but complete and utter contempt for the people you're supposed to be helping.

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

[HisGrace]

This is what happens when you pander to the poorly educated with blatant lies. These people objectively do not know what's best for them.

They obviously need a Hillary supporter to go down there and tell them what's best for them.

I know you need to meet your Hillary mentioning quota for the day, but could you at least address the actual point of the article?

If you want people to trust you more than they trust some dishonest reality TV star, then don't treat them like dog sh**t.

It's not about "trust." It's about facts. Reality doesn't care about anyone's fee fees getting hurt.

So much for the alt-right caring about "facts, not feelings".

[Santander]

This is what happens when you pander to the poorly educated with blatant lies. These people objectively do not know what's best for them.

They obviously need a Hillary supporter to go down there and tell them what's best for them.

I know you need to meet your Hillary mentioning quota for the day, but could you at least address the actual point of the article?

If you want people to trust you more than they trust some dishonest reality TV star, then don't treat them like dog sh**t.

It's not about "trust." It's about facts. Reality doesn't care about anyone's fee fees getting hurt.

So much for the alt-right caring about "facts, not feelings".

Coal miners are not exactly a core alt-right demographic.

[Fuzzy Bear]

You can't teach old dogs new tricks.

That's how snot-nosed young Progressives, many of whose idea of hard work is pulling an all-nighter studying for finals, view folks who have invested their bodies, health, and lives in a job that has been as much of a career for them as IT is for a computer nerd.

These folks don't know "their own best interests"?  Many of these folks own their homes.  The jobs they would be "retrained" for are nowhere near where they live.  If they could sell their homes, they couldn't get enough value to purchase something affordable in what would likely be a more expensive locale.  And that doesn't account for the age discrimination and the discrimination against the long-term unemployed that these workers would face in the workplace.

Does this mean that these folks should just blow off retraining on the hope that public policy will change and mining jobs will return?  Not necessarily; retraining may well be the best option.  What's snot-nosed is the attitude of young Progressives, many who whom have never worked, that "retraining" is a no-brainer.  It's an attitude that stems from school being one's most extensive life experience.  When the workplace replaces school as your most extensive life experience, and it's coupled with managing the day to day needs of YOUR family, things become a bit more complicated. 

I, too, was once a young, snot-nosed Progressive.  Decades in the workplace and decades supporting a family cured me of a degree of that awful mucus-related condition.  I'm trying not to be a Crusty Old Fart, but my life is such that I am now a 60 year old with a 35 year old's set of needs, so I've come to see it both ways.

[Rookie Yinzer]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

[publicunofficial]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough. 

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

The interests of the rural and inner-city poor are very much intertwined.  Yet "progressives" here advertises their contempt for one group and calls for them to "get with the (retraining) program", yet makes no such demands for the inner-city poor who have generational unemployment as well as generational poverty.  I attended a seminar about "Bridges Out of Poverty" where much was discussed about the flaw in saffety-net programs; how these programs were designed for folks with middle-class values to apply to folks whose values are, decidedly, not middle class.  Why is it OK to make that accomodation for the urban poor in, say, Chicago, but not for the rural poor in West Virginia?  Is "retraining" not the product of a middle-class value system, shoved down the throats of folks by outsideers "for the greater good"?

[Fuzzy Bear]

I like to believe that people are smart enough to know that believe that coal isn't coming back, but living in a world of alternative facts can make people desperate for jobs go for what would seem to be salvation when it is just false hope. _{Notice that I avoided demeaning coal miners, Ice Spear}

You're not telling me anything I don't know. We all deal with wishful thinking and false hope in our lives. That doesn't give you an excuse to permanently live in a fictional reality though, much less blame blacks/browns/gays/women/Muslims for all your problems.

And I don't see how it's "demeaning" to say that someone doesn't know their own best interests when stories like this prove it.

Government works best when you have nothing but complete and utter contempt for the people you're supposed to be helping.

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

Were the riots in Ferguson, MO not a deplorable way to respond to the situations there that deserved legitimate attention and remedy?  Whey do Democrats not dismiss the Ferguson, MO rioting mobs ad "delporables"?  I mean, what exactly is the standard here?

[publicunofficial]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

True enough.  

What truths should the inner-city poor be told?  That their poverty is, largely, the decision of many young single females to bear children outside of marriage, by a male who is not likely to be prepared to act as a husband, father, and family provider (roles that provide family stability)?  That the negative conditions in impoverished urban communities are, in no small measure, made worse (if not caused) by the young male residents' criminal behavior within that community.  Why is it OK to lecture the unemployed coal-miners about their "bigotry", but OK to allow the anti-white sentiments routinely expressed in inner-city communities to go unchallenged?  Why are the inner-city poor that have no high school education, no training (often despite opportunities for such training), but who vote Democratic with regularity viewed by folks like RFK1968 as "low information voters"?

Aaand this is why I'm not a Republican, either.

Whenever we find a group of people who the government and our society has completely failed them, for generations, and now uplifting them from that situation is extremely difficult, the knee-jerk reaction is "Oh they're just lazy.", "Oh, they don't want our help.", "They need to address their own problems as a community first before we can help".

It's a sneering, condescending attitude that enrages me when I see it in either party.

I don't disagree with this.  I don't advocate the lecturing and sneering.  It serves no useful purpose. 

I DO think that the decline in family formation and family stability IS, however, an important factor in both urban and rural poverty.  The likely long-term outlook and long-term outcome of a child in a low-income family with two (2) marital parents in the home, in general, is so much more positive than long-term outlooks and outcomes of non-marital families that it amazes me that we have to educate folks as to the advantage.  This is not to say that the worst two-parent marital family, riddled with abuse and dysfunction, is better than the best single-parent family with a positive role model as head of household, but it is very much true in the aggregate.  Rural AND urban poverty is, very much, driven by out-of-wedlock births and the decreased stability of non-marital households (again, in the aggregate). 

Incidentally, one reason I am for single-payer healthcare is that it has the potential to stop the practice of folks deliberately not getting married so that delivery of a child can be funded by Medicaid; the present system PUNISHES poor married folks who are in the situation of having a spouse being pregnant but being up a creek as far as medical coverage for the child goes.

[Rookie Yinzer]

I have empathy for their situation. Not the deplorable way they respond to it.

Why would it matter anyway? These people supposedly hate special snowflakes and easily triggered politically correct liberals. Can dish it out but can't take it? I'm just "telling it like it is", the very quality they love about Trump.

I agree with you. I’m tired of the pussy footing and skating around that we do when it comes to uneducated white people because we can’t hurt their feelings. They have no problem getting in the gutter and expressing their disgust with affirmative action, Hispanic immigration, same-sex marriage, or any other policy that don’t like but they can’t handle the truth about an industry that is basically a ing death sentence. Stop trying to pander to ignorant people and tell them the truth.

The more I read posts from liberals like this the more I think leaving the Democratic Party was a good choice.

Because I refuse to coddle people who choose to be willfully ignorant? Whatever.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Woke Thatcherism is an extraordinarily obnoxious ideology.

[Brittain33]

It is a bit ridiculous to go up to a 50-something-year-old who has never done anything other than coal mining and say "why don't you take up coding?" The economic hardship of resuming schooling immediately after losing your job is stunning and people are being asked to transition into jobs that are totally out of their skillset or comfort zone.

True, but this guy is only 33 years old. In my mid-30s I pushed the reset button on my career. It was hard but doable.

You likely had a specific idea of what you wanted to do and expectations you'd be able to do it and not move from where you wanted to live.

What do you think the world owes a 33-year-old who is not willing to make a big change in order to have a career? Maybe you disagree, but I think his situation is different from a man 20 years older who will have a harder time learning new skills and will face serious age discrimination.

[Maxwell]

wow now we have a permanent underclass of americans who are fueled entirely by resentment. Thanks Trump!

[publicunofficial]

Woke Thatcherism is an extraordinarily obnoxious ideology.

Social Darwinism is bad unless we're talking about people that vote 70% Republican.

[tallguy23]

Wow this thread got ugly really quickly.

Honestly the poor/working class would be better off dropping cultural issues and voting with their pocketbook as a group. Abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in school won't help you pay your rent.

[Indy Texas]

wow now we have a permanent underclass of americans who are fueled entirely by resentment. Thanks Trump!

That's the only way Republicans can keep winning elections.

Keep the white people uneducated, unemployed and bitter, and then tell them it's all the mean lib'ruls' fault. (Or the Mexicans, the Muslims, the gays, whoever fits the situation.)

[pbrower2a]

You can't teach old dogs new tricks.

That's how snot-nosed young Progressives, many of whose idea of hard work is pulling an all-nighter studying for finals, view folks who have invested their bodies, health, and lives in a job that has been as much of a career for them as IT is for a computer nerd.

These folks don't know "their own best interests"?  Many of these folks own their homes.  The jobs they would be "retrained" for are nowhere near where they live.  If they could sell their homes, they couldn't get enough value to purchase something affordable in what would likely be a more expensive locale.  And that doesn't account for the age discrimination and the discrimination against the long-term unemployed that these workers would face in the workplace.

Information technology can be done anywhere. One of the biggest users of IT is Wal*Mart, situated  in the Mountain South. But let's all remember that the dwindling number of coal jobs is the contemporary equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath. The difference: the political culture is elitist and sadistic. It's Donald Trump this time instead of FDR.

The coal mining jobs are not coming back any more than that the Dust Bowl is likely to become a fruited plain again. 

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This is the most nightmarish era for white* people in America since the Civil War. Our economy has the enrichment of people like Donald Trump (rent collectors bleeding the middle class) above all else. We have never had more corruption and reactionary ideology as guides to political leadership. To spoof the state motto of Michigan: Si quaeris dictaturam incipiens, circumspice


Sometimes one must sell out cheaply just to get a chance to live in a new world in which landlords get 50% of your income for a single-bedroom apartment. We live in a pure plutocracy in which the elites have no responsibilities to the common man except in the better times of American history, and those elites have exactly the President, Congress, and most state legislatures in the first stage of doing their bidding. The rest of us will be obliged to suffer with a smile.

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Having faced my own set of difficulties, including difficulty getting and holding jobs, and loneliness that results from having no clue that those difficulties are not my fault, I am in the position at an age much like yours, in which I have no problems that an Afterlife or reincarnation wouldn't solve. I hold in contempt politics and culture made for morons.  If you want to know what politics made for morons is like, then recall this:

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You  guessed it -- Satan Incarnate, in Mein Kampf.

I prefer leaders who bring out the best in human nature, and that includes fostering wisdom, knowledge, principle, and overall competence. Someone who says "I love low-information voters"
will never bring out the best -- only the worst. 

I prefer also that people can get away with being snot-nosed progressives.   

*We are all in the same mess. But white people fell for Donald Judas Trump as others didn't. Others know what they face. White people are going to be completely shocked to find themselves just as victimized as those who voted more sanely as groups.