Mining foes want to keep us down

To the editor:

Ben Davenport’s puppet show, the Alliance for Progress in Southern Virginia, and the Virginia Coalition, called themselves community leaders and economic developers as they bashed uranium mining, the most promising enterprise currently proposed for their region.

Most ridiculous of all is their expressed concern over "stigma." What greater stigma is there than the consistently horrible statistics that paint our region as a wasteland of low-wage jobs, unemployment and child poverty? Do they not know that behind every one of those statistics are families and their children who are suffering cruelly from this blight?

Just who are these "leaders"? Setting aside the politicians, the apparent ring-leader is Davenport, chairman of First Piedmont Corp. His main pals in this are Charles Majors and Jeff Haley, executives at American National Bank.

And let’s not forget Danville’s own man for any season, the durable Linwood Wright, who is always available for a fresh appointment.

What have these fellows brought to our community? Most of them came to prominence in the 1980s, when Danville and the county were doing pretty well with manufacturing, agriculture and other businesses. New cars gleamed on the streets, and families were proud to call Southside home.

Everyone knows what happened next: Tobacco and textiles departed, and our prosperity with them.

Since then, these men and their agreeable minions have appointed themselves in charge of regaining our prosperity. How have they done? The only sensible way to find an answer is to pose this question: Are things better or worse than when these people decided to take charge of our destiny?

For the answer, look at the twin blights of heart-breaking unemployment figures and abysmal education levels and crushing childhood poverty that continue to ravage Southside families.

All the while, these men have been peddling their economic development treatments through organizations like the Future of the Piedmont Foundation and the Danville Regional Foundation. They have used millions in public money to prop up the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research that has become symbolic as a solution looking for a problem — a symbol bragging about its high-tech promises and doing nothing to address the awful human drama playing out before us.

It is cruelly ironic that when a billion-dollar enterprise comes along — looking not for government handouts and tax breaks — and wants to inject the region with the largest economic infusion in its history, that the people who have failed so miserably are the first to try to kill it because it might create a harmful stigma.

They would do well to look upon the real stigma of Southside that lies before us and the world — and reconsider their self-serving positions opposing the development of the Coles Hill project.