I strongly recommend that everyone
read teacherken's Daily Kos diary, "Now that the Wise health fair is over..." Here's an excerpt:
Yesterday va dare gave me a tour, including driving to the top of Black Mountain, on the border with Harlan County KY (and at the border, at 4411 feet, it is the highest point in the Bluegrass state). From the top one could look at at multiple sites of mountaintop removal. Or one could simply look nearby at a huge sheer expanse of white - bare, naked rockface. Not something you would see naturally among these ancient green mountains. It stretched over half a mile, and perhaps 1,500 from bottom to top. The rest of the mountainside has been sheared away to get the coal, dumping the rest as valley fill.
That image has stuck in my mind, because it is applicable to my reaction to the Remote Area Medical / Missions of Mercy event at which I volunteered. We have people who care deeply about the place in which they live, in which their families live. They care deeply for one another. We saw husbands and wives come together, come older, some only in their late teens or early twenties. Some were missing parts of legs - perhaps mining accidents for the men, almost certainly diabetes for the women. We tried to serve as many as we could. I saw the dentists, the dental assistants, the ordinary volunteers, trying to treat each person with respect and dignity. These are our fellow citizens. They are not their dental conditions. They are not the situation of economic distress to which somehow our society has allowed them to be stripped, almost like that naked expanse of rock. Some just wanted to stop the pain - take out all the teeth. Others desperately wanted to save their front teeth, to be able to smile, at least partially.
This connects with much of what I feel about educational policy. Our President has supported his Secretary of Education in insisting that states evaluate teachers by the test scors of their students. My students are not merely their test scores. That is like seeing only the coal in the ancient mountain, and that approach winds up with the naked, white rock face appearing as a huge scar across an otherwise beautiful - and ecologically rich - landscape.
Many of the mountains were previously raped for the lumber. Now they are being raped for their coal. In neither case does the extraction benefit the people who live there. And to have so many of those people subject to the indignity of massive dental extraction with no immediate followup for dentures speaks loudly - we as a nation do not care. About our landscape which we value only for the resources we extract, about our school children whom we reduce to numbers on tests that really do not indicate what a child knows or can learn and do, about those of our people who are in so many ways shunted aside.
Powerful stuff; I strongly recommend that everyone read the
entire diary, and thank teacherken for writing it.
