"Blood on the Mountain" was just released. It should remind us all that while Donald Trump promised the coal miners that he would "bring back all of your jobs" there is no way we are going to be able to do that. Just another lie to garner votes. And Hillary Clinton had no answer to the charge that she turned her back on coal workers.
The plot of "Blood on the Mountain" is that it's a heartbreaking history lesson about a land of opportunity where Americans take up livelihoods that kill them. The main character is West Virginia's coal mining community, as they are in a state of constant struggle, whether at the beginning of the industry when towns were built to service the newfound natural resource, or later when they formed unions, or battling non-union workers who wanted to take their jobs in the middle of protests. Throughout these chapters, of course, is coal's toxic nature, destroying the lungs of workers, or creating mountains of waste controlled by dams that have been known to break (as with the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972, which killed 125 people). Evans and Freeman's film richly depicts this messy, perpetual state of inhumanity, but does so with a very clear mind and a big heart, reaching out to the viewer with captivating journalism.
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