Tag: Oklahoma

Although it may seem counterintuitive, freedom is actually enhanced, not curtailed, when states have the right to experiment, subject to important federal constitutional limitations, with social and economic polices till they do right by their citizens.

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way generations of my family might speak of maybe a better crop or a new well next year.

What if you can’t live in the place where your imagination feels at home? What if you can’t ever stay in one place long enough to grow roots? What if you have to drive through fast-food-lined headache traffic for an hour a day to get your children to school? Is the solution to find the value in the joke on the Carl’s Jr sign? Is it to be friendly to the stranger in the grocery store? Is it to more intensely contemplate the size of the sky?

It is hard to say who this land belongs to, but I know without a doubt that I belonged to it from my earliest youth. I was raised just south of town, on a defunct dairy farm surrounded by miles of pasture and scrubby woods. I can barely remember a time before I was allowed to roam over that countryside freely.

Unlike many I grew up with, I’m proud to be an Oklahoman. I’m proud to have a family heritage that is tied to a place and has roots in a community. I’m proud of a community, however flawed, that has an identity and a passion for keeping itself as honest and pure as possible.

I’d been through this movie before. Streets closed to traffic, a procession of elite athletes before tens of thousands of spectators. And then the...