Hard Times in the Hills... and the Curious Case of Congressman Woodbooger Griffith

WISE COUNTY — Folks across Southwest Virginia are feeling the squeeze these days, and it’s not just in one place. It’s everywhere.

Tariff taxes are pushing up prices from the grocery store to the feed store. Farmers buying fertilizer say the bill keeps climbing while the check for what they sell doesn’t. Hardware stores are charging more for everything from fence staples to sheet metal. Electric bills keep rising, and they’re going up a whole lot faster than most folks’ paychecks.

Add in wars nobody around here remembers voting for, gas prices creeping up again, and the steady worry about American service men and women being sent overseas, and the mood around the coffee counters has gotten pretty sour.

Then came the latest news from the Wise County Board of Supervisors, who effectively raised property taxes by 14 cents per $100 of value.

Hard times indeed.

And that’s when many locals started asking the same question.

Where exactly is our congressman?

Around here, people say spotting Congressman “WoodBooger” Griffith during moments like this can be about as easy as spotting the real WoodBooger itself. The creature others call Bigfoot is famously shy, rarely seen when work needs doing.

Old timers will tell you it wasn’t always that way.

Back in what folks like to call the “Good Ole Days,” Southwest Virginia had a congressman named Rick Boucher. Love him or disagree with him, nobody ever accused Boucher of disappearing when WORK came calling.

If tariff taxes were raising prices on working families, he would have been writing legislation to eliminate them.  Not vote for them to give tax breaks to Billionaires.

If electric companies were raising rates, he’d have been raising a little hell about it in Washington.  Writing legislation to help us mountain folks.

And if working people in the coalfields were getting squeezed from every direction, he would have been somewhere, everywhere in the district explaining what he was doing about it.  Putting in the work.

These days, residents say they mostly hear from our current congressman through press releases explaining why rising costs are somebody else’s fault.

Local hunters claim our political WoodBooger Griffith behaves a lot like the legendary one. It appears during campaign season wearing a friendly smile and promising to fight for working folks.

But once the votes are counted, it quietly slips back into the woods.

One man at a diner in Wise County summed it up best this week while stirring his coffee.

“Used to be we had a congressman who wore work boots,” he said.

“Now we’ve got one that disappears like a WoodBooger when work shows up.”