In October, students performed a “lie-in” demonstration on the Lawn to protest slack gun control laws, in response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. While not the research project or letter-writing campaign I might recommend, the act attracted a good amount of attention from state-wide media and higher ed outlets. See above video.
On Friday, in line with both the performance art protest method and the practice of rhyming, students held a “die-in” in front of the corner Bank of America to symbolize the deaths of coal mine workers, which they perceive the company to cause by investing in the coal industry. The Daily Progress gave it about as much attention as it deserves: 128 words.
Why do students think they can help to foil a multi-billion dollar industry via one of myriad funders, in the context of a country that’s already reforming its environmental practices in spite of an ill-willed central government? Why am I letting it bother me?
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Tagged as: Protests, Questions, University of Virginia, UVA
GO TO CLASS!!!
Although, next to the internet and maybe paper print, crap written on sheets is a truly timeless medium.
Hmmmm…what do I do when this sheet says that I should go to the acapella gal’s choir (with a mildly clever sexy pun name) at 8 tonite, but that other sheet (cleverly hung with water-filled 2 liters to hold it down) says that there’s a screening of some dump film that no one wants to see at 8 as well. What to do? In this case, go to the event listed on the nearest sidewalk chalk display.
Go ahead, UVA, bump up the tuition by $10K.
It is a better topic than that group of ninnies getting themselves arrested for the living wage.
Self importance is the hallmark of undergraduate-ness, I know it was for me. I would kill to go back to that time.
I say forgive them. Allow them this time to feel like they can change the world and all. Everybody should have a little bit of that time, even if it seems silly from our ivory towers of cynacism.
I’m with B’Yo… I always assumed I’d be an AIDS activist a la ACT UP when I was in college, not a corporate marketer who worries about mortgage rates. I miss my go getter attitude and my unfailing certainty that I could always just wait tables to pay the bills and still have the energy to save the world.
That being said, I feel nothing but fury towards the “protestors” that still hang out in front of the federal courthouse on Thursdays to protest the war. Dudes - you make me embarrassed to be a liberal - if you spent 1/10 the time you spent holding placards raising money, you could fund a congressional seat. That and honking is stupid - loud and stupid. (Of course, I could just be jealous that they haven’t lost their passion, but it’s more likely that I’ve just become complacent and bitter. Whatever - I guess I should go hang myself with a Gucci belt or something else equally steeped in materialistic symbolism.)
Don’t tell the people in front of the courthouse to go away. I enjoy, on the rare occasion that I’m there when they are, running up to them and saying “Sorry I’m late guys, I had to WORK!”
Jeeze man, those protesters are actually just a handful of senior citizen Quakers, near as I can tell. How much more harless could they be? Bagging on them is like only a couple steps up from ripping on the Amish.
*harmless*
yea, why is it bothering you?
while the end product of these marginal protests is questionable, the act itself is pretty vital to american public citizenship. i mean apathy is right up there on my to don’t list but come on, is this really gripeworthy? and if they’re protesting, they’re most likely staying on campus, and that is a beautiful thing.
but i mean if they blocked your way to bodos, it’d be a whole other issue.
That’s who’s left? Now I feel bad for saying it, it was people that deserved it when I last saw them gathered there three years or so ago…
Silly little knuckleheads.
More power to them. This country is crippled by apathy and fear. Security’s a joke and we know it. Thank god somebody is willing to lose a little face to at least say something important, even if it is of little consequence. Think about it: at the height of the Vietnam War, the late 60’s, millions regularly gathered to protest in D.C. but the war still went on for another five years. It’s sad but true, our “representative democracy” doesn’t give a damn what we think, and until we come up with a way to shake them up, we will remain powerless.
General strike, anyone?
As a general rule, any male student involved in any activity [other than drinking or having one off the wrist] is doing it in order to get laid.
As a general rule, any male student involved in any activity [other than drinking or having one off the wrist] is doing it in order to get laid.
And? Actions still speak louder than motivations. I may just have a beer and fire off some knuckle children for world peace tonight, and I am not even a student.
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya… unf!
/TMI?
Maybe I’m just an idealistic college student (for another 11 days, at least), but any kind of protest against terrible global practices seems good to me. The only way to get at bad practices of natural resource collection a la coal or oil is to hit the brands that support them. By protesting the Bank of America, perhaps they will rethink their investments in certain aspects of the coal mining industry. The only way to make change these days is to take little steps that lead to bigger steps that eventually lead to reform. Current reform is good, but things can always be improved. What’s so annoying about that?
It’s tragic that coal miners lost their lives doing their jobs, but that’s what happens in a dangerous profession. Cops die. Soldiers die. Hell, I bet a few pizza delivery guys died in America this year. The fact of the matter is that the coal industry generates most of the electricity produced in America. Why not protest the hospital while you’re at it. We all use electricity.
Coal mining is a dangerous job and miners are compensated accordingly. The average salary for a coal miner in West Virginia is about $70,000 a year–among the highest paid professions in the entire state. The cost of living is excruciatingly low in coal country (in Appalachia, at least), and a miner makes three times as much money as most individuals living in those areas. To put it in perspective, a house in Mingo County, West Virginia costs less than a third as much as a regular three bedroom starter house in most neighborhoods of Charlottesville. That $70,000 in Mingo County is equivalent to making around $250,000 in Charlottesville, or as much as nearly all of the highest paid medical specialists in the UVA hospital.
So why don’t you naive, pretentious, uninformed do-gooder university students take your baseless opinions and stick them up your asses?
B-Yo… mine was merely a vapid generalization on what brings certain people to a particular party. Don’t read too deeply into my inane ramblings since they are, as Confucius [551BCE-479BCE] would say “a load of flucking clap” and as such should not have escaped the wrath of the delete button., but there you go…publish and be damned is my mantra.
LOL to Knuckle Children… I match that with Baby Gravy and raise you Granny Palm and her 5 sisters.
You’d think that they’d check on where their own power comes from before they start picking on BoA.
I mean, if the power to your house was produced by coal and you pay your power bill, doesn’t that TECHNICALLY make you a coal power supporter? And then wouldn’t that make you a bit of a hypocrite?
I think Waldo had a link to a site the other day where you could put in your zip code and find out what source your power comes from - I’ll have to try to find it. I think mine was somewhat equally split between nuclear (Lake Anna, probably) and coal.
I kind of agree with Ethan, just not so vehemently as he put it, and I’d like to see where he gets his numbers.
This says coal miners make $64,000/yr in West Virginia, but I have seen higher figures from official releases from the West Virginia state government.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2006-02-14-miners-cover-usat_x.htm
Average cost of a house in Mingo County is $78,000. Average rent is $329/mo. This was 2000, but it has probably not changed. Mingo County isn’t exactly booming. That’s where all the snake handling tabernacle churches are.
http://www.city-data.com/county/Mingo_County-WV.html
Mingo County housing:
http://www.city-data.com/county/Mingo_County-WV.html
Mining statistics:
http://www.nma.org/pdf/m_wages.pdf
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2006-02-14-miners-cover-usat_x.htm
The average salary is $64,000, not $70,000 in West Virginia, but I could have sworn I have seen higher figures printed by official state documents.
Oops, somehow my first post got lost and then appeared.
Ethan’s right. See page 2.
“Into the Darkness”
Washington Post Magazine: Sunday, January 21, 2007
I read this when it was published, and it’s well worth your time.
And students, seriously, China sees 13 deaths every day in coal mines, and the statistics are going up.
Here.
This is like the Lawnies’ protest to Robert Sweeney moving to the Lawn. Why don’t you figure out how to secure the $3 billion funding the University of Virginia needs to operate so your tuition doesn’t go up and your faculty don’t leave for better salaries somewhere else and employers don’t give you a blank stare when you say what school you went to? Who was the University’s first fundraiser again? Students, you have no real responsibilities in spite of “self-governance,” which means your opinions don’t matter that much! Enjoy it while it lasts!
I grew up in West Virginia quite far from “coal country,” but everyone knew that coal miners and their unions commanded an extraordinarily high level of financial and political clout in a state that routinely sits in the mid-40’s in terms of per capita income. Whenever protesters gather together to campaign for “social justice” for any “disenfranchised” bloc in the state, I feel personally offended. There are a lot of people from the outside that routinely come to “save the West Virginians from themselves,” and the implication is that West Virginians are too stupid to look after their own well-being. There is no better example than this debate about the coal miners. The ignorant see the miners as poor, uneducated, downtrodden, quaint Appalachian folk who are practically forced into the mines by the industrialized and civilized urbanites. In a region where 30% of everyone lives below the poverty line, coal miners live like gods. Some kids graduate from high school to work one summer in the mines to pay for their entire college education.
Yes, some coal miners died last year; it’s an unfortunate event. However, they knew the risks, and they decided making a Charlottesville-adjusted $250k/yr was worth that risk.
bullshit. When my grandfather died from “black lung” after working in the West Virginia coal mines for 40 years, there was no money for anyone to go to college and he barely scraped by. All of my mothers side of the family from W. Va were coal miners, and all of them were poor, while the owners of the mines stayed very warm and cozy and Rich.
Mountaintop removal proceeds apace.
My only W.Va. politics story is that the woman who ran the motel in the middle of nowhere told me all her sons were leaving because there was no fishing because the rivers had been poisoned by the mines. That was 20 yrs. ago.
How long ago was this, Caroline?
ditto almost to the word Caroline, except that my grandfather didn’t die of black lung. Whatever, as long as the bastard’s dead…
Floozy After extensive meditation through the various rituals of ‘varnishing the bannister’, ‘patting the robertson’, ‘liquidating the inventory’, ‘playing a little five on one’ and ’shaking the fist at the ex girlfriend’, I have come to the epiphany that we must protest the death of pizza deliverymen that Ethan has so rightly brought to my attention. I propose that we all, en masse, dress in oversize pizza outfits that folks in large cities wear to hand out coupons, and stage a die-in outside Christians, (as they dont deliver). There will be a somber reading of the orders that were being attempted to be delivered at the time of eachdeath (“extra large meat lovers, two liter pepsi, crazy sticks” *ding*). Then the “dead pizzas” will be put in oversized cardboard boxes, festooned with coupon style rememberances, and carried down the mall by pall bearers in Domino’s uniforms chanting “No Justice, No Piz-za”. The casket calzones will then be placed at the steps of city hall because, well… Im sure that there is some way we can blame somebody there for some of this. Anyway I am sure this action will be a seed of change that will grow into a mighty movement that sweeps the nation and maybe one day, 25 years from now, the History Channel will be doing interviews with us for their “Delivery Justice Delivered? 25 Years, How Far Have We Come?” retro biopoic. Of course Ken Burns will have to cover the whole experience in thirty minutes or less, but still…
Who’s with me?
FDA Is Urged To Toughen Rules on Salt: Intake Causing Deaths, Consumer Group Says
By Sally Squires
Washington Post, November 30
These, Tom, are the Causeheads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week.
e, my uncle died from black lung last year and his family is on welfare. so, last year dude.
Guess he didn’t work in a union mine.
Ethan, you should know that we do protest to personally offend you. And I, for one, didn’t know you could research - I thought you spent your days making veiled death threats.
If not for organizers, we wouldn’t have women’s suffrage (that’s voting, Ethan), black suffrage, a 40 hour work week, overtime pay, children’s labor laws, workplace safety laws and all kinds of other goodies we take for granted today. What’s the beef? University divestment from South Africa helped lead to the fall of Apartheid. Some good can come from these frivolous activities.
And I’m sorry, but that mine owner was taking unneccessary chances and endangering his employees. Cops’ lives would be much less dangerous if not for the WAR ON DRUGS. And soldiers… oh yeah, that’s their job.
To hell with all you curmudgeons. Doesn’t Rush Limbaugh have a discussion page where you can can go and mock the poor and infirm?
I did some of the protests Crips talked about when I was in college and even I didn’t believe they would work but some of them did. As for coal mines, unions, etc., as I recall it lots of those companies technically went out business so they wouldn’t have to pay pensions, unless that was the steel industry, and as you can imagine lots of other skulduggery occurred. It’s not like these are generous, cooperative people we are talking about who ran these things, unless just by luck from time to time, I mean get a clue. I’m sure you heard lots of stories about ungrateful overpaid workers in high school, but I heard a lot of crap around here about feuding families which turned out to be total b.s. (Academic proof: here they had English surnames not Scots-Irish. You can buy the book on the expulsions at the Humpback Rocks overlook!)
For extra credit fun, watch the movie Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), it’s at Clemmons I think.
But I digress. “Melodrama” indeed!
Ha, maybe I’m just an academic who trolls people on this site in my spare time. Women’s suffrage, black suffrage, meat inspection, worker safety are all great causes that wouldn’t have been achieved without protesting, but the fact of the matter still remains that coal miners make an average salary of $64,000 per year in a region that is two shades away from being considered “third world.” Even as recently as 30 years ago, coal miners received little compensation, but things have changed since then. This isn’t 1920. The “mine boss” doesn’t grip his workers in a stranglehold. Unions are a powerful thing, and the unions have fought for better working conditions. Only about a dozen miners a year die in accidents. As lilith mentioned earlier, that is the number of workers that China loses in a single day. A hundred years ago, a thousand Americans lost their lives in the mines every day. The cause, while just at one time in America’s past, simply does not need any more championing. If you want to protest Bank of America’s investment in the coal industry, go ahead, but be aware that all of us have coal to thank for our standard of living. Environmentally speaking, I’m all for new and cleaner forms of energy, but emissions have also improved over the last 30 years. Destruction is a side product of energy production, plain and simple.
Well said.
Here is the Bank of America Protest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbqZSTd6wkA
80% of US Energy Comes from Coal.
I want a solar car, a solar house, and a clear view of the solar system. Maybe it’s time to rethink strip-mining, oil wars and blood power in general.
cripsy, werd.
Then stop bitching and start a revolution.
And a correction to my previous post: I mean a thousand miners died each year a century ago, not each day.
Haha, that video makes those people look really, really stupid. “Coal was never really [an] efficient [form of energy] in the first place.” Our entire fucking civilization was built on coal over the last two centuries.
Yeah, that and slave labor.
hahahahahaha….ETHAN said “stop bitching”…..hahahaha.
Touche, crispy. But slavery isn’t the topic at hand.
They’re back! Students (I’m assuming) protesting outside the downtown mall Bank of America as recently as five minutes ago (12:50 pm). Some sort of 12 Days of Christmas Ditty they were singing - and something about “no such thing as clean coal”! It was so precious, but they didn’t have a tip jar out, so I just kept on walking.
[…] The lameo Bank of America protesters were back. This time they had witty Christmas tunes that were anti-Bank of America due to their […]