“I’ve Seen the Future. It Looks Like Appalachia.”
This is a headline that sticks with me from our first days of publishing 100 Days in Appalachia — conceived the day after the 2016 election and launched on Inauguration Day 2017. The headline evokes a dystopia of income inequality, eroding infrastructure, declining community institutions, ravages of addiction on human agency and dignity, material and digital extraction and civil unrest. It conveys a friend’s tongue-in-cheek coping phrase:…
