When I was in elementary school, I met a man who worked in the Merrimac Mine in VA (closed 1935 after two anarchists dropped lit dynamite into a gas pocket) who one late summer day got on a train and headed up to Logan County with an 1895 Winchester and a pack of hard tack in solidarity with his UMWA brethren. He must have been about 90 when we met him. Our teachers shuffled him out of the room when he started talking about "The Civil War" because "he was getting confused."

It wasn't until much later that I realized it was some of the realest shit anyone had ever said to me. It didn't really matter that it wasn't the civil war, it still was a civil war, and it was the one he'd fought in. He'd staked his life to that he deserved to be treated with dignity and that future generations shouldn't waste away deep beneath the earth the way his friends had. I think about that that was the kind of person who was willing to say some seemingly bonkers shit to some 10 year olds just to jolt them awake because that's who he was. That was what he knew. I also think about that he met us. He saw us. He created a connective tissue between the elders of his day. If they were as old to him as he was to us, they would have been more in 1837 before anyone new the value of the coal beneath the soil in our home valley. The most military technology of the time was powered by the wind. They grew up knowing, and hating, the southern plantation system that existed in nearby valleys and down in the piedmont just south and east of where we grew up. One of them probably even knew the enslaved man who built the finest building in the entire valley, a building so impressive and beloved that the entire town gathered the funds to buy his manumission papers, and then helped him buy the mill that would a few years later be burned down 3 times by both the Union and Confederate armies under the assumption that the owner was feeding the other army.

He spoke to us. He spoke to us the way those elders had spoke to him. He said something so threatening to the status quo that it was assumed to be nonsense. I think when he was a boy probably some old abolitionist said something like that to him that didn't set in until he was old enough to get on that train. Ever since I realized the value of this connective tissue I have lived my life to preserve these stories and pass them into future generations. To help people of today see that the settler-colonists who first defiled this land and tried to create plantations despite the dense forests and ill suited soils just to turn over a quick buck, who killed and raped the Muskogee native Americans who had been here for millennia, and who pushed the escaped enslaved Africans from Florida further west into what is now Kentucky are the same people who joined the Confederate army, are the same people who refused to respect the results of the post-civil war elections and created the Jim Crow era, are the same people who thugged for JH Blair, are the same people who Dr Martin Luther King and Angela Davis resisted, are today once again active and going by the name "Immigration and Customs Enforcement."

When I was in my 20s, I was naive. I thought that the moral arc of history was long, and bent towards justice, and that I would know liberation in my time. I see things very differently now. It will probably be some 10 year olds I speak to when I am 90 who know the freedom I am so thirsty for. Even then, this may be my naivete. The generations between me and them may be too twisted by the hatred that has been engendered in me that I hold toward the people who enable the system we suffer under for the process of communal healing to be complete. Thank you for sharing the story of Blair Mountain with more people. It is but one example of many of the great American imperial project's violence against my people. The greatest advice I can give, especially right now during Pride month, is to build the largest and widest coalition you can, and to never stop speaking truth into the universe.

I am reminded of a song (though everyone should go listen to Union Maid or Which Side Are You On immediately). "Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. So keep on loving and keep on fighting"