Anyone in a gas-drilling state has seen or heard the ads talking about how fracking creates jobs and those jobs are  keeping “real” Americans’ communities alive. These ads often have a purported member of the community (extra points if it’s a grandmother or a hardworking dad) talking about how grateful they are to the fracking companies for saving their town.

The subtext, of course, is that people opposed to fracking are at best indifferent to the survival of these communities, at worst utterly opposed to it because of snobbery or hatred for people brave enough to do manual labor.

We were just tipped off to this video from a community meeting in Arkansas last year, when a truck driver stood up and exposed that poisonous false dichotomy for what it is.

He’s a bit difficult to hear, so here’s a transcript:

” I am a truck driver. I drove their water tankers. I am going to leave the names of these companies out of it. But I tell you right now, as the low man on the totem pole you are going to be right in the middle of it. It’s a sick industry. Now these drivers will not get up and stand up for their wages because their wages are better, they get $15 or $20 an hour they think they are in high cotton. But just the same anything I had to say, when they told me go clean a frac truck out, I said under OSHA regulations I’ve got to have a haz mat suit on.

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