BY BOB BEARDEN
Where are we today in Red State Oklahoma? A state so red that it scorches one’s finger to the touch. A mid-term election is only a few short weeks away and you have to wonder: Will Oklahomans get it or will they hold to the maga mantra of the “big lie?”
Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain and your honey lamb and you watch the hawk make lazy circles in the sky. That Oklahoma likely never existed and, given where we are today, would be mocked and feel weirdly out of touch with what we have become.
We have an electorate that almost always votes against its own best interests and keeps electing people to office who don’t give a tinker’s damn about Oklahoma or the people who populate it.
Take the teacher walkout [can’t call it a strike; and why not?]. They went off the job, got a raise and some few concessions, and pretty much all of the rural area teachers voted the same people back into office who didn’t want to give them their due in the first place!
It makes no real sense, but there it is – rural Oklahoma still sets the tone for where Oklahomans stand in election after election, bemoaning what they don’t have and then they vote to not have it again.
Will this year be any different? Likely not, despite a plethora of great candidates on the D side of things. Lots of great women candidates who, if elected, could and likely would take this state in a direction that makes sense and go to where no man has gone before [to borrow a line from Star Trek].
But will the good citizens of the state vote for what they need or put the same old tired white men back in place to continue the same old same old?
We shall know soon, but my mind doesn’t compute a real change to come sweeping down the plain – just a few more predatory hawks making lazy circles in the sky. And We The People feeling the effects of their talons on our skin.
However, hope does spring eternal! Or does it?
Bob Bearden is chair of the board of trustees of the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation and a member of Mayflower Congregational Church, UCC in Oklahoma City.
