The next power bill you get might be high or low. There are a lot of little items that are listed in addition to the energy you consumed to keep things comfortable and running in your home.
These charges are fees that fall a little short of being taxes, but that's what they are - when your thinking gets real.
Now, for the really real.
What you will never see on your bill is the cost of human life that it costs to bring the coal and other energy sources to supply your energy needs.
When the West Virginia miners died a few days ago, added to the the deaths in Ireland, it dragged my heart back to familiar, mournful ground.
I am a first-generation non-miner. My parents and grandparents were determined that I would not work in or for the mines.
My maternal grandfather had worked first as a logger and timberman to provide shoring material for the mines and then, to support his wife and family, learned mining and then demolition.
His job was to drill the holes in the rock surrounding the veins of the black gold and then set the dynamite and nitroglycerine that would make digging the coal possible for the other miners.
This was especially dangerous back in the 20's and 30's. Ventilation was poor and mine owners did as little as possible to care for the safety of the workers.
My Papaw used a carbide lamp, an open-flame lamp that could ignite the methane that was always lurking deep underground. there were also things called "kettle-bottoms" - accretions of heavy rock that the miners might undercut and then the whole thing might fall or shift on them.
One story that I was told was of a miner who was hit by the edge of a kettle-bottom mid-torso. The edge essentially cut him in half but the weight kept him from bleeding out instantly. My granddad held him as this miner's life left his halved body.
At the time my granddad was doing his work, my grandmother was raising three children (one would die in the flu epidemic of 1918), she was providing room and board and packing lunches and doing laundry for two other miners and worked as a practical nurse for the mining camp.
She also taught reading in a school on Sundays for the children of the miners.
This was the age when there were no unions and miners were paid in company script, to be exchanged at the company store.
Another awful event occurred just over the mountain from the mountain where they worked when the miners tried to unionize and staged a strike.
Mine owners paid thugs to attack the miners with high-power rifles, machine guns and even had a few bombs dropped on them.
My grandparents held out doing this work as long as they could but then an opportunity opened for my Papaw to work as an engineer at a coal-fired power plant in Glen Lyn, Virginia.
I showed up there a few years after my dad and uncles won the second world war.
Now, at this point, the damage to my granddad's lungs was becoming evident. Not only did he have black lung, he had rock dust in his lungs and that was complicated by emphysema.
We lived in sight of the 300-350 train-car long tons and tons of coal that kept coming from the bowels of the mountains.
The power plant generated electricity and cinders.
Today the plant is greener but the cost of the coal is still high.
So many miners do not have to die.
Better policing can be done.
Companies can learn to care.
Those that don't should care about getting outside their jail cell for an hour each day to see the sunlight that the dead miners will never see again.
The United States government can do better and the State of West Virginia can do better.
Mining is a way of life. It is hard, tough work and to be respected.
We can reduce the risk and still get the coal.
You can reduce your demands doing some simple, inexpensive things - but I, for one would appreciate your prayers for these men and women who work underground. Bless the miners, their families and bless you all. © tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com
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