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...James Lowe started talking, something he couldn't do until a year ago. He is 51, a disabled coal miner from the hollows of eastern Kentucky, and he was born with a severe cleft palate. When he tried to talk as a boy, he couldn't make himself understood, so after a while he stopped trying. Lowe dropped out of school in the fifth grade, followed his father into the mines and still couldn't afford treatment. Then he was partially paralyzed in a mining accident. That didn't leave him many options...
...March 12, 2001, as company buses ferried miners to the nearby village where they were staying, waiting paramilitaries stopped the bus carrying union president Valmore Lacarno and vice president Victor Orcasita. They boarded the bus, Lacarno was taken off and promptly shot in the head in full view of fellow miners. Orcasita was bundled off, reappearing hours later with a lacerated chest, smashed teeth and a bullet in his brain. The next miner to step forward as leader, Gustavo Soler, met a similar fate several months later...
...this fight has become personal - in part, it's a story of people who feel deeply wronged by powerful outsiders. Elsie Gray, who had driven two hours from her home to stand in the rain for the victims' rally, is one of the aggrieved. Her son, a former coal miner, is serving a 15-year prison sentence after being caught with two OxyContin pills and 2.4 grams of cocaine. She was angered that the fines were mostly going to state and federal Medicaid fraud or other health programs, not specifically to rehab programs. And now she feels like these executives...
Lowe is 51 years old, a disabled coal miner from the hollows of Eastern Kentucky. He has never been one to get up in front of a crowd. Until last year, he wouldn't have been able to speak to the crowd even if he wanted to. He was born with a severe cleft palate; when he tried to talk he could not make himself understood, so after a while he stopped trying. He was one of 10 children, born to parents too poor to pay for the treatment he needed, and of course there was no insurance. Embarrassed...
...Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the satirist, who struggled with depression, repeatedly explored the harmful effects of industry on human beings' collective morality. After laboring in obscurity for decades, he shot to global fame in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a POW and "corpse miner" in Dresden after the Allies bombed the city in 1945--a book he said took 25 years to complete. At times dismissed as too accessible, Vonnegut once said his goal was to "poison [readers'] minds with humanity." Through his protagonist Eliot Rosewater, he famously echoed the dominant theme...