“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: “It gets worse before it gets worse.”

But I’ve been thinking about that headline differently and our efforts since 2016 to collectively rewrite a different future, one where Appalachia, especially young Appalachia, is fully cognizant of the dystopia and hopeful nonetheless. We can speak hope, joy, power and despair in one breath. We are fluent in this. One of our youngest team members said recently: “That is the crevice I live in — joy and dystopia.” 

This is something the nation, and the future, can learn from us. Importantly, this learning happens by inverting the flow of knowledge and expertise so we “lead up and out” from the community level, disrupting longstanding national or institutional narratives about who and where we are.

Over the eight years of 100 Days in Appalachia, we’ve had our fill of “elite” narrators of Appalachia’s challenges, which — from their frame — was always happening elsewhere. But their elsewhere, as we often point out, is our home. This is why we pour our resources into building a future with more equity between local communities experiencing the extractions and harms, and those who have held narrative, policy and decision-making power from afar.

But it is not enough to have narrative power. True power is economic power, and this is why we invest money and wages in the voices, production and talent of Appalachians. This means paying reporters, writers, producers, essayists and filmmakers. This means paying artists and musicians in collaborative pop-up events. This means investing in our youngest Appalachians and their narrative power, so they can all in turn invest in their communities, from participating in local economies to practicing community care in harm reduction.

We recently convened a series of community events and roundtables with out-of-school young people aged 17-24, collecting oral histories across diverse communities in several Appalachian states. In one of these events in West Virginia, I was struck with pride and joy in the eclectic crew of young Appalachians, and was reminded — as we hope to continue to remind the rest of the world — that there is no more complex community than our own.

I was struck with how astutely they identify root problems, how they dissect power, how they affirm and build community against the most disabling and demeaning of odds, the mutual respect and care they show for each other across a myriad of politicized and weaponized divides. I thought, “it’s a shame that this beautiful wellspring of power has been either ignored or manipulated.” But then I realized that it doesn’t matter – they are the narrative and cultural power of this place, whether national media or political parties notice them or not. Their reality is their power, and they are coming for the future.

Their top concerns are not the stuff of national news, but the daily concerns of lived experiences — mostly apolitical in affiliation and not reflective of party rhetoric, yet deeply, personally political in their understanding of power dynamics and where local change needs to happen. They’re concerned about flooding and pollution in their nearby river, addiction, access to mental health care, jobs and opportunity, affordable housing, affordable child care and affirming racial, religious and gender equity. Far from being victims of misinformation, they expressed keen insights about the extractive mechanics and harms of online polarization and distress about extremism and political violence.

The one word I have heard again and again in our work is “respect.” It is hard for people externally to fully understand how much the sense of respect — whether as young people, poor people, or rural people — has been denied us. This is why 100 Days in Appalachia counters alienating, shame-based narratives about who we are and where we live from media, institutions and society, to build community resilience and narrative power from within.

In the post-election landscape, we’re watching the familiar and predictable turn of national media, pundits and parachuters once again to our weary, rural spaces. 100 Days has been (in an all-too fitting metaphor) a canary in a coal mine for dystopia, and we were shouting long before people had ears to listen about what was coming to our communities, both on and offline. Here we go again, as we shake our heads, and tell the world:

We’ve seen the future, it looks like young Appalachia.

Support 100 Days in Appalachia

Help 100 Days in Appalachia continue to grow our groundbreaking work, especially with our GenZ and GenAlpha community members’ rural realities. Invest in their imagining of a future that is true for them. Invest in work that centers young Appalachians as experts in their own lives and makes room for their curiosity, nihilism, complexities, contradictions, hopes, trauma and all that is anchoring them at this moment in history. 

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