Political Quotes

“I'll add a story here. I remember back in the 1970s, in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, where a dam broke and wiped out the town. I remember going there to work with the Red Cross. In the late evening at Van High School, I was talking to a gentleman who had lost his home. He had said that, before the dam broke, the police had come down the street, and they'd said, Leave your homes. The dam has broken. He said he grabbed his kids, and they ran up the hill as fast as they could. As fast as he could run, the water was at his feet, and when he turned around, his home was gone; the town was gone; there was nothing left. In the darkness of that classroom late at night, I could hear him beginning to cry, and I said, But you have your family. He said, I know, and there is someone else in this town who has lost everything. He even lost his family. I said, Well, prayers and good luck helped you. He said, No. It was also the fact that we heard the same warnings. The difference was I listened, and he did not. We are at that same point, too. We are hearing about the existence of towns all throughout Appalachia and all throughout this Nation. We need to be mining American coal and using our ingenuity to clean it up, not shut it down, to help all these towns, to help the schools, and to help those families.”