Although I grew up in the anthracite region, I was shocked to read last weekend that 19th-Century miners could hardly see the underground workplaces where they spent 12 hours a day, six days a week.
“They worked in near-darkness with oil-wick lamps filled with a mixture of kerosene and fat,” Nancy Honicker wrote for the Pottsville Republican Herald. “The kerosene barely illuminated the space around them and gave off smoke that burnt their eyes.”
A lot has changed since then. But when it comes to politics and government, Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers are pumping out smoke and working feverishly to shut off anyone shedding light on their actions, which are often reckless and haphazard but consistently evil and dictatorial.
They know the midterm elections are coming and that multiple polls show more Americans than not disapprove of Trump and his Project 2025-infused administration’s policies on the economy, inflation, trade and immigration.
And other polls found little love for unleashing the military on U.S. cities (which happen to Democratic) or sending it to stalk Venezuela and execute people in Caribbean and Pacific waters based on unsubstantiated allegations that they were trafficking drugs.
No wonder Trump seems to prefer strutting whatever’s left of his stuff at leaders of faraway countries. Still, White House reporters for the Associated Press wondered whether his recent trip to Asia would be enough to distract us voters from our concerns.
Those include bread-and-butter issues like the government shutdown’s effect on crucial programs, higher prices resulting in part from Trump’s capricious tariffs, and increasingly unaffordable health care because of his One Big Beautiful Bill for billionaires.
In addition, Trump is itching to wage war in Latin America for no reason except maybe to distract his base from his administration’s refusal to release all of the Jeffrey Epstein files. (Those files are important enough to keep House Speaker/Trump puppet Mike Johnson from seating Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who was elected more than a month ago, because her signature would force a vote on this matter.)
There are also brazen power grabs, such as pressuring red-state politicians to do mid-decade gerrymandering to make Congress even more MAGA and Project 2025-friendly.
And there are once-unspeakable authoritarianism moves.
ICE’s tactics get more Gestapo-like by the day. The Washington Post reported that the agency now has new surveillance technology, including spyware that can infect even locked smartphones. And it will be used on both undocumented immigrants and anti-ICE protest networks.
ICE says it only wants to prevent violence, but remember how Trump said he only wanted to deport bloodthirsty gang members (as opposed to blue-collar workers and day laborers)?
The administration is also threatening and punishing individuals and entities, including universities, media outlets, law firms and prosecutors, for doing or saying whatever it doesn’t like, from encouraging diversity and inclusion to implying Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk wasn’t a saint to calling the Jan. 6 insurrection the work of a mob.
And Trump has wrecked the White Houses’ East Wing to make way for a $300 million monstrosity for him to entertain his 999 favorite donors.
We still know what’s going on because all sorts of principled people – journalists, politicians, bloggers, podcasters, academics, demonstrators and social media users — can still tell us.
Thanks to them, information is still available for anyone who wants to learn before they vote.
In fact, I’ve voted by mail since 2020 because this method makes it easier and more convenient to research candidates and ballot questions — which may be one reason Trump/Project 2025 wants to eliminate it.
It’s easy to take this information for granted. In fact, so much of it is so dire that it’s tempting to stay in the dark instead of watching whatever fresh hell the administration inflicts.
But just as the coal miners of yore faced potentially fatal hazards by laboring in darkness and with lamps that could set off explosions, so does our country if we allow the administration to drive the truth-tellers underground.
The miners didn’t have safety lamps. We, however, have legitimate, fact-based news to read, watch and share. Most of all, we can use it to challenge government propaganda and conspiracy theories intended only to blow up what has made America great.
Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
Photo: Dall-E
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