CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A Cross Lanes consultant has invited West Virginians to a new kind of West Virginia Day celebration. At abetterwestvirginia.com, Jason Keeling prompts readers to "Identify an obstacle that hinders West Virginia and discuss its solution."

Topics may include business, culture, education, environment, government, health, technology or infrastructure, for example. He has invited participants to submit comments directly, to submit posts from their own blogs or to send messages via twitter. Today, the 146th anniversary of the state's creation, visitors to the site will be able to read the responses.

The effort is a sequel to last year's alternative celebration, which asked West Virginians to share the best of the state.

Keeling has hit on a thoughtful, constructive way to mark the state's 146th anniversary. In keeping with his pensive tone, we offer, as is our tradition, some historic thoughts for the day:

"Summon every energy of your mind and heart and strength, and let the traitors who desecrate our borders see, and let history in all time record it, there was one green spot -- one Swiss canton -- one Scottish highland -- one county of Kent -- one province of Vendee -- where unyielding patriotism rallied, and gathered, and stood, and won a noble triumph." -- Wheeling Intelligencer, April 30, 1861, Editor Archibald Campbell, urging mountaineers to split from seceding Virginia and remain loyal to the North

"This was no land for lily-fingered men, who bowed and scraped and danced a neat quadrille. ... Our state was whelped in time of strife, and cut its teeth upon a cannonball." -- from Rhymes of a Mountaineer by Roy Lee Harmon, West Virginia poet laureate

"Rippling mountain streams that glisten in my dreams / Peaceful valleys that I used to roam / When the dusk is falling, I hear the bob-white calling / in my West Virginia home. / Green hills in the spring, a bluejay on the wing / rhododendron blooming everywhere / Gentle folks who greet you like old friends when they meet you / There's no place that can compare." -- from West Virginia's Home to Me, a song by former Daily Mail Publisher Lyell Clay

"Whether or not mountaineers were always free, they were almost always poor." -- John Alexander Williams, West Virginia, 1976

"There are 'colonies' within the United States. West Virginia is in a sense a microcosm of such a colony. It is partially owned and effectively controlled by coal, power and railroad companies, which in turn are controlled by vast financial interests of the East and Middle West. The state Legislature answers to the beck and call of those interests. Strip mining, the curse of several states, has easy going in West Virginia. Black lung cancer takes an awful toll among miners. ... The 'mother' interests that own the wealth of West Virginia appear secure." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in Points of Rebellion, 1969

"Rough mountains rise all about, beautiful in their bleak ugliness. ... Yet they have their moods. On gray days they lie heavy and sullen, but on sunny mornings they are dizzy with color. ... They are gashed everywhere with watercourses, roaring rivers, bubbling creeks. Along these you plod, a crawling midge, while ever the towering mountains shut you in. Now and then you top a ridge and look about. Miles and miles of billowing peaks, miles and miles of color softly melting into color. ..." -- James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, writing in 1923 in The Nation as he covered the West Virginia mine war

"In mountains there is freedom. The Earth is perfect everywhere, except where man comes with his torment." -- Friedrich Schiller, German poet (1759-1805)

"This is a desolate place -- steep hills dotted with tiny shacks and rows of coke ovens, rising straight from the wicked, wicked river, full of rapids." -- poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, letter to her husband as she traveled to Charleston in a 1924 reading tour

"Where the mountain river flows / and the rhododendron grows / is the land of all the lands. ..." -- from Hill Daughter by Louise McNeill Pease, West Virginia poet laureate

"Here is hard-core unemployment, widespread and chronic; here is a region of shacks and hovels for housing; here are cliffs and ravines without standing room for a cow or chickens. In this region of steep mountains, a person is exceptionally fortunate if he is able to hack out two or three 10-foot rows of land for potatoes or beans." -- Erskine Caldwell, describing Mingo, McDowell and Wyoming counties in Around About America, 1964

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A Cross Lanes consultant has invited West Virginians to a new kind of West Virginia Day celebration. At abetterwestvirginia.com, Jason Keeling prompts readers to "Identify an obstacle that hinders West Virginia and discuss its solution."

Topics may include business, culture, education, environment, government, health, technology or infrastructure, for example. He has invited participants to submit comments directly, to submit posts from their own blogs or to send messages via twitter. Today, the 146th anniversary of the state's creation, visitors to the site will be able to read the responses.

The effort is a sequel to last year's alternative celebration, which asked West Virginians to share the best of the state.

Keeling has hit on a thoughtful, constructive way to mark the state's 146th anniversary. In keeping with his pensive tone, we offer, as is our tradition, some historic thoughts for the day:

"Summon every energy of your mind and heart and strength, and let the traitors who desecrate our borders see, and let history in all time record it, there was one green spot -- one Swiss canton -- one Scottish highland -- one county of Kent -- one province of Vendee -- where unyielding patriotism rallied, and gathered, and stood, and won a noble triumph." -- Wheeling Intelligencer, April 30, 1861, Editor Archibald Campbell, urging mountaineers to split from seceding Virginia and remain loyal to the North

"This was no land for lily-fingered men, who bowed and scraped and danced a neat quadrille. ... Our state was whelped in time of strife, and cut its teeth upon a cannonball." -- from Rhymes of a Mountaineer by Roy Lee Harmon, West Virginia poet laureate

"Rippling mountain streams that glisten in my dreams / Peaceful valleys that I used to roam / When the dusk is falling, I hear the bob-white calling / in my West Virginia home. / Green hills in the spring, a bluejay on the wing / rhododendron blooming everywhere / Gentle folks who greet you like old friends when they meet you / There's no place that can compare." -- from West Virginia's Home to Me, a song by former Daily Mail Publisher Lyell Clay

"Whether or not mountaineers were always free, they were almost always poor." -- John Alexander Williams, West Virginia, 1976

"There are 'colonies' within the United States. West Virginia is in a sense a microcosm of such a colony. It is partially owned and effectively controlled by coal, power and railroad companies, which in turn are controlled by vast financial interests of the East and Middle West. The state Legislature answers to the beck and call of those interests. Strip mining, the curse of several states, has easy going in West Virginia. Black lung cancer takes an awful toll among miners. ... The 'mother' interests that own the wealth of West Virginia appear secure." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in Points of Rebellion, 1969

"Rough mountains rise all about, beautiful in their bleak ugliness. ... Yet they have their moods. On gray days they lie heavy and sullen, but on sunny mornings they are dizzy with color. ... They are gashed everywhere with watercourses, roaring rivers, bubbling creeks. Along these you plod, a crawling midge, while ever the towering mountains shut you in. Now and then you top a ridge and look about. Miles and miles of billowing peaks, miles and miles of color softly melting into color. ..." -- James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, writing in 1923 in The Nation as he covered the West Virginia mine war

"In mountains there is freedom. The Earth is perfect everywhere, except where man comes with his torment." -- Friedrich Schiller, German poet (1759-1805)

"This is a desolate place -- steep hills dotted with tiny shacks and rows of coke ovens, rising straight from the wicked, wicked river, full of rapids." -- poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, letter to her husband as she traveled to Charleston in a 1924 reading tour

"Where the mountain river flows / and the rhododendron grows / is the land of all the lands. ..." -- from Hill Daughter by Louise McNeill Pease, West Virginia poet laureate

"Here is hard-core unemployment, widespread and chronic; here is a region of shacks and hovels for housing; here are cliffs and ravines without standing room for a cow or chickens. In this region of steep mountains, a person is exceptionally fortunate if he is able to hack out two or three 10-foot rows of land for potatoes or beans." -- Erskine Caldwell, describing Mingo, McDowell and Wyoming counties in Around About America, 1964

"Oh the green rolling hills of West Virginia / are the nearest thing to heaven that I know. / Tho' the times are sad and drear, and I cannot linger here / They will keep me and never let me go." -- from The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia, a song by Utah Phillips

"A place where all you need to be is what you are. ... A past that in the present somehow makes you feel secure." -- Leaving West Virginia, a Kathy Mattea song

"On the map, my state is probably the funniest-looking state in the Union; it resembles a pork chop with the narrow end splayed." -- John Knowles, in the West Virginia volume of Holiday magazine's American Panorama series, 1960

"The state is one of the most mountainous in the country; sometimes it is called the 'little Switzerland' of America, and I once heard an irreverent local citizen call it the 'Afghanistan of the United States.'" -- John Gunther, describing West Virginia in Inside USA, 1947

"Almost heaven, West Virginia ... I hear her voice, in the morning hours she calls me. The radio reminds me of my home far away. And driving down the road, I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday... ." -- from Country Roads, by Bill and Tammy Danoff

"There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice. Injunctions and guns, like morphia, produce a temporary quiet. Then the pain, agonizing and more severe, comes again. So it is with West Virginia ... Medieval West Virginia! ... With all its grim men and women; When I get to the other side, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia." -- labor organizer Mother Jones, in her autobiography, quoted by Eve Merriam in Growing Up Female in America

"You might be considered a West Virginian if ... (1) Your front porch collapses and more than six dogs are killed ... (2) Less than half the cars you own actually run ... (3) Your diploma contains the words 'Trucking Institute' ... (4) Your wife's hairdo has ever been caught in a ceiling fan ... (5) You have a rag for a gas cap ... (6) Your brother-in-law is also your uncle." -- late Gazette columnist James Dent

"I am the hills. I will sing your song ... . There is a permanence about my people, and strength. For hands that tamed a wilderness cannot die ... ." -- from Sing, Appalachia by West Virginia poet Muriel Dressler

"In the dead of the night / In the still and the quiet / I slip away like a bird in flight / back to those hills ... ." -- from West Virginia, O My Home, a song by Hazel Dickens, a Mercer County native.

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"O the West Virginia Hills, how majestic and how grand, with their summits bathed in glory ... ." -- from The West Virginia Hills, one of three official state songs

"There is music in the flashing streams / and joy in the fields of daffodils / And laughter through the happy valleys / of my home among the hills." -- from My Home Among the Hills, another official state song

"The population of this vast mountain region is divided into two distinct classes, as far removed in character and environment as it is possible for people to be.  First, there are those who live in fertile valleys along the rivers and the railways, with the very best religious and educational advantages, and who are equal in intelligence and refinement to any people in America. [People of the second group] do not live in these favored valleys, but far back from the main lines of travel in small clearings by the watercourses, almost entirely removed from the outside world, with few advantages for learning and few opportunities for improvement. The extreme poor live 'back of beyond,' beyond the towering mountains, locked in narrow coves, without teachers, without physicians, without comforts and conveniences." -- the Rev. Homer McMillan, Unfinished Tasks of the Southern Presbyterian Church, 1922

"Mountain communities share other features besides the obvious topographic ones. For one thing, they often have a second-class status that keeps them at the margin of national agendas. Terms like 'hillbilly' aren't limited to Appalachia. Thai hill tribes and Ecuadorian highlanders, among others, face the same prejudice. Infrastructural improvements like roads, not to mention communications, lag in mountain areas, and so do investments in education and jobs. Still, flatlanders appropriate mountain resources in the name of everyone, as in, 'Mountain forests and streams and energy belong to everyone.'" -- Atlantic Monthly, May 2000