olunteer

Noble Pioneer Museum

Empty: An abandoned building is a haunting reminder of the county's dire state

Abandoned

Catching up on events

carries food to be delivered from her thrift store to children as part of the center's Food Backpack Program on April 19

Married students Starr Lewis, second right, Travis Lewis and daughter Ariel Lewis, three weeks, attend the Owsley County High School prom on April 21

Mr Noble's situation is not unfamiliar to those in the region

Pots and pans spill from the kitchen sink and litter the floor, sodden with dirt and worn through the years

t residents take pride in their community's history; and locals are driven to help one another through hard times

Kidding around: Mechanic Chucky Oliver, left, jokes with a client at his shop

Spirits high: Owsley County Outreach Center director Cleda Turner

On horseback: Riders

his dog

Mose Noble

nieighbours have offered to help when they can

Filth: Johnny Noble sits inside his uncle's trailer, sandwiched between a stack of logs and clutter from all sides

Boonesville

$45,000 a year for a family of four. In Owsley, the median household income is $19,351

U.S. Census Bureau

Job shortages hit the region hard due to declines in demand for coal, lumber and tobacco;

According to the 2010 U.S. Census

It was a county formed 19 years before the Civil War.

Ask people what they'd grab if their house were on fire, the way our national house is on fire right now. No one ever says it's the tricked-up microwave they got at Wal-Mart.

don't spend six months of the year whining for the toy du jour

with enough garage space to start a homeless shelter.

But if it's so obvious, how come for so long people have not realized it?

And in the process they began to realize that it's all trifles

If the mall is our temple, then Marc Jacobs is God. There's a scary thought.

ee-standing storage facilities, where junk goes to linger in a persistent vegetative state

so did the rest of us

By 2010 Americans will be a trillion dollars in the hole on credit-card debt alone.

The passbook was replaced by plastic

By contrast, my father will be happy to tell you about the excitement of getting an orange in his stocking during the Depression.

The suffocation of a store employee by a stampede of shoppers was horrifying, but it wasn't entirely surprising

an addiction to consumption so out of control that it qualifies as a sickness.

hat passes for the holiday season began before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, when a worker at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by a mob of bargain hunters

belongs

Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can youstruggle against Fascism

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you areused to seeing in print

What is above allneeded is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around

colloquial

it is especiallyconcerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn itsusefulness.

he decadence of our language is probably curable

Look back through this essay, and for certainyou will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I amprotesting against.

Inour age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues arepolitical issues

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity

“I believe in killing off youropponents when you can get good results by doing so.”

Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along theroads with no more than they can carry

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness

If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomedto make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he issaying, as one is when one utters the responses in churc

one often hasa curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kindof dummy:

lifeless, imitative style

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing

5),

By using stale metaphors, similes,and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaningvague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

. The attraction of this way of writing isthat it is easy. It is easier —even quicker, once you have the habit

. Yet without a doubt it is thesecond kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English

Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely.

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel theconclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibitsno tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that aconsiderable element of the unpredictable must invariably be takeninto account

fear that they might have to stop using thatword if it were tied down to any one meaning

n the case of a word like democracy, not only is there noagreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

If words like black and whitewere involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he wouldsee at once that language was being used in an improper way.

nglish words that will cover one’s mean-ing. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness

there isno real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in theEnglish language

are used to dignifythe sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims atglorifying war usually takes on an archaic color

are used to dress upa simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biasedjudgements

the ends ofsentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces

he passive voice is wherever possible used in preferenceto the active,

pad each sentence withextra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry

a writer who stopped to think what he was sayingwould avoid perverting the original phrase

a sure sign that the writeris not interested in what he is saying

Examples

which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because theysave people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves

prose consistsless and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning

vagueness and sheer incompetence

The writer either has a meaning andcannot express it, or he inadvertently says something els

5.

Letter in Tribune

acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisonedwells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, androuse the agitated petty-bourgeoise

ll the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the franticfascist captains

al-ter their number and intensit

institutional approval keepsin the forefront of consciousness

Professor

Milton

but because they illus-trate various of the mental vices from which we now suffe

to think clearly is a necessary first step toward politicalregeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is notthe exclusive concern of professional writer

written English, is full of badhabits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willingto take the necessary trouble

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be afailure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks

But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing theoriginal cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and soon indefinitely

it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have politicaland economic causes

like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs toaeroplane

It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sen-timental archaism

decadent

women

An apple thuds to theground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree to tree

How glad I am that the fight is

he guns go pop pop pop.

Each of those thoughts, even in memory,was far more positive, reviving, healing the creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate.

Augusts--in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna;in London.

. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. Allfeeling, save one dull dread, ceased

One, two, three, four five, six . . .

They point at a spot exactlyabove this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room.

They would honour them for their refusal to bear children. They would give them otheropenings for their creative power.

Suppose

he is driven by voicesin himself--ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition.

Othello's occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello.

education

There are to be no more guns, no army, no navy, no air forcein the future. No more young men will be trained to fight with arms.

nd one of the terms of peace,the loudspeakers say, is to be disarmament

we shall be told

Up there on the hillunder a net tagged with strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns areconcealed. Now they all fire at once

If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny

Hitlers are bred by slaves.

We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing

t is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave

But if he stops to think he maybe killed; and we too. So let us think for him.

subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.

directly above the house

The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead.

Destroy that, and you will be free

We are both prisoners tonight--he boxed up inhis machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with a gas-mask handy.

It is not true that we are free

Every day they tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom.

wrods

ast and furious.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not withit.

All the idea-makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men.

And thehornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind

fire them off

we can fight with themind.

she must fight, so far as shecan, on the side of the English

How far can she fight for freedom without firearms?

She must lie weaponless tonigh

The defendersare men, the attackers me

sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away

searchlights finger the clouds

op pop pop

not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be bor

cool and consecutive

zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting youto death

Virginia Woolf

Let

We need toface biological and cultural facts and notprolong the life of a flawed institution that is outof date

at least the adults who dominate the world ofcolleges

We shouldentirely abandon the concept of the middleschool and junior high school.

Informationand images, as well as the real and virtualfreedom of movement we associate withadulthood, are now accessible to every 15- and16-year-old.

they have used highschool to isolate the pubescent and hormonallyactive adolescent away from both the picture-book idealized innocence of childhood and themore accountable world of adulthood

By the time those who graduate from highschool go on to college and realize what reallyis at stake in becoming an adult, too manyopportunities have been lost and too much timehas been wasted

masquerading

individuals of the same age group define eachother’s world

the high school outsiderbecomes the more successful and admiredadult

The result is that theculture of the inside elite is not contestedby the adults in the school. Individuality anddissent are discouraged

The team sports of high school dominate morethan student culture.

artificial intensityof a world defined by insiders and outsiders

the American high school isobsolete and should be abolished

You will then reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety

opulent

Even

It is aimed at the negro as a gentleman, as a successful man and a scholar

he light of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon the colored people in the South, than it ever did in the cause of any other emancipated people in the world

On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies.

Whoever is for equal rights, for equal education, for equal opportunities for all men, of whatever race or color,— I hail him as a “countryman, clansman, kinsman and brother beloved.”

I insist upon it that the lesson which colored people, not less than white people, ought now to learn, is, that there is no moral or intellectual quality in the color of a man’s cuticle; that color, in itself, is neither good nor bad; that to be black or white is neither a proper source of pride or of shame.

while slavery lasted, we could seldom get ourselves recognized in any form of law or language, as men.

We are not recommended to love or hate any particular variety of the human family more than any other.

I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action.

The Constitution makes no distinction on account of race or color, and they should make none.

I have no hesitation in telling you that I think the colored people and their friends make a great mistake in saying so much of race and color.

Criminals, guilty of heinous crimes against the State and society, are let go free on more generous conditions than were our slaves.

degradation

He was driven from time to eternity in the darkest ignorance.

They were, indeed, terrible enough; but deeper down and more terrible still were the mental and moral wrongs which enter into his claim for a slight measure of compensation.

ascertain

To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being.

They suggest to him no idea of the wonderful world in which he lives

Without education, he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance

But if man is without education, although with all his latent possibilities attaching to him, he is, but a pitiable object;

latent

Some know the value of education, by having it. I know its value by not having it.

To properly teach it to enduce man’s potential and latent greatness, to discover and develop the noblest, highest and best that is in him

In his natural condition

He is not so fleet as a horse or a hound

“Were I designed yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law designed, Why was an independent thought E’er planted in my mind?”

There is in my opinion, no useful thing that a man can do, that cannot be better done by an educated man than by an uneducated one

Things which can be done simply with the exertion of muscle, and with little or no exertion of the intellect, will develop the muscle, but dwarf the mind.

However much I may regret that it was my lot to have been a slave,

They must not be all masters, or all servants. They must command, as well as be commanded.

compensation possible to mankind

Pride and insolence will certainly be developed in the one class, and weakness and servility in the other

Exclusive service, or exclusive mastery, is not good for the moral or mental health of any class

remunerative

decided

needful labor

While I have no sympathy whatever with those who affect to despise labor, even the humblest forms of it

nominally

a State so averse in the past to the education of colored people

people so greatly needing it

better educated brothers.

pecuniary