…birdflew…

When the “breaker boys” in the photo worked fourteen or sixteen hour days, any daydreams of the childhood they were missing were snuffed out by sheer exhaustion. What exhaustion didn’t kill, physical ailment mangled; one stray thought meant pieces of slate and coal went crashing into fingers and hands, breaking small bones. Thoughts of school or lazy Saturdays went up into the air along with the dust that went into their lungs and aged them from within. “Black lung” it was called, but the small miners knew it was just another side effect of the American Dream. Youthful energy didn’t go away; it clung to the coal, burned and ascended heaven like unheard prayers, blackening and condensing into smog. The hopes of a generation went into the incinerator along with the anthracite that fueled the Industrial Revolution, leaving instead massive amounts of CO2, soot particles which still gnaw away at the ozone layer.

So today, as you consider global warming and climate change and ways to “green” your life, it is the dead dreams of children that float over our heads. As the mercury inches up, crossing every line the scientists draw in the sand, the sins of our laisse faire fathers literally decide the fate of our children and us. Ultimately the ghost of child labor gets its revenge as the byproducts of burning coal still create the acid rain that chips away at the Carnegie and JP Morgan marble shrines to Industry and Wealth and Progress, built by youth mortgaged away ton by ton. Ironic that the small miners’ most lasting contribution is as visible and as invisible as they were.