coal miners ~ calling it as I see it

For me, these pictures are pleasing to the eye. Pictures of miners by social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin. Mining is not considered a glamorous occupation.
     My grandpappy was a coal miner, worked down in the shaft mines of West Virginia. When he was older, he "graduated" to work up top running the convever belts from the tipple to the rail cars that carried the coal to distance cities. Folks in New York and Chicago, you can be certain, they didn't want to know how they got their buildings heated.
     He never spoke badly of the work he did, but whenever anybody amongst his kids and his kids children asked about the mines and what it was liek to work there, you could quickly tell he didn't want us having anything to do with the mines. Eventually, he died of black lung disease.      Although largely forgotten and ignored [except when some horrible disaster happens that the mine operators can't keep from the press] these men [and the occasional woman] are true heroes indeed. They risk their lives ~ in the short run by going into the mines, in the long run by slow death caused from incomprehensibly hard working conditions ~ so the rest of us can heat our houses, enjoy plastic, steel, and other products made from these things.
     Few, if any out there even think about the miners. And why should they? They are invisible.
     Officially, slave labor may have legally ended, but until the mine operators are cut down a few pegs ~ not rewarded so finely, for gross indifference to others' lives [and this is so be the operators come from USA, China, Somalia or anywhere else] then slavery, in my mind, will still be practiced and tacitly endorsed.