Liberty's Library

Originally written January 4, 2006

Mornin' Everyone,

There is so much I wanna say about the Sago Mine situation. So much I wanna say about the national media's efforts to cover-up their mistake of running with a story that had not been confirmed, only later to say "Oops, we're sorry, your husbands, brothers, sons, and daddies are all dead". However, I need to learn from my past mistakes. There will be a time and place for finger-pointing and for blame-placing but that time is not now. Just as it was post-Katrina, we need to help people first then we'll worry about finding fault.

For those of you who don't know, we are the local CBS affiliate for the Sago, WV area. Our reporters know these people and their families. They are our neighbors. They are our brothers and sisters, church family and friends. When CNN pushes local people around so Anderson Cooper can have a better shot of our grieving statesmen, it doesn't go unnoticed. There was a swift and marked effort to only talk to the local media once those horrified people of Sago saw how the "big shots" treated West Virginia.

How completely ignorant do national reporters have to be to refer to this state as "Virginia" or to utterly misrepresent themselves by giving "Tallmansville" as their location. You are not in Tallmansville, you are in Sago. Please get it right. I thought the people of West Virginia were the backhills hicks who didn't know their butts from holes in the ground...and here we have the National Associated Press using the incorrect state abbreviation, "W.Va." Attention media, the United States Postal Service assigned all of the states two-letter abbreviations while I was still in elementary school. The abbreviation for West Virginia is "WV". It is not W. Virginia. It is not W. Va. It is not, West V. It is WV...period. Even if you graduated from a sub-par Journalism School you should still know all 50 of the state abbreviations.

[deep breath]

I do not consider myself a West Virginian. I never will. I was born in Ohio, a completely different state with a completely different history and a completely different socio-economic make up. However, I am actually physically angered at the simple dismissal with which some folks in this country treat the Mountain State.

These mountaineers are laughed at, spit on, ridiculed, subjected to countless sneers and jeers, culturally emasculated, and dejected at every turn by more states than not. And for what? I suppose it is because West Virginians are "stupid, slow, tobacco chewin', cousin datin', back woods, good-for-nothin hicks". Such arrogance makes me sick. Let me remind those who currently have this mindset that West Virginias know in what state they live. They know how to spell it, they know how to abbreviate it, and they know how to appreciate it for what it is.

Today, they lost 12 of their brothers and you lack the cooth of properly identifying their town.

Shame.