Red Fork's Emily Knocks One Out of the Park

Inadvertently proving that reactionary old conservatives (like moi) and relatively liberal-ish folks (like Emily) CAN find points of agreement, she writes:

...I am sick to death of this ludicrous notion that Tulsa would suddenly become the Magic Kingdom, with a soaring economy, a zero-percent unemployment rate, and choirs of angels floating above its gold-paved streets, if only we could provide more entertainment for unmarried twentysomethings.

Amen, an' amen!

Now, I don't know that she would necessarily go to the same place I am about to go, but from where I sit...

...well, I've been living in this city for the overwhelming majority of my life. My ancestors on both sides of the family, to the very best of my knowledge, have been in Oklahoma since before the War of Northern Aggression. After suffering the humiliating misfortune of being born in a Godforsaken hole an Arkansas military hospital, I spent a year in France, and then a year or so in Wisconsin, and then wound up in Broken Arrow for several years. Since the age of eleven, except for Marine Corps boot camp and duties, I have resided in Tulsa.

I remember when I used to go down to the grocery store and buy a candy bar and pay--to the best of my recollection--four cents of sales tax per dollar of sales. Just call me crazy, but I seem to recall that there was a fire department, that there was a police department, there were roads, and there weren't bizarre homeless people everywhere. There weren't sick little old ladies bein' thrown out onto the streets or any other such thing.

Over the years, we have added a penny here, a penny there, a ha'penny there, and so forth, until we are now paying darn near ten cents on the dollar in sales taxes. And so help me if every darn cent of it wasn't "sold" on the premise that it was an "investment" that would draw in new blood and new business by virtue of improving something, ANYTHING, but streets, fire, and police! Well, okay, some of it was ostensibly supposed to accomplish certain "investments" in the streets themselves, as though we weren't supposed to notice that the sales taxes we were ALREADY paying were supposed to be, in part, for that, and it wasn't getting done, and the tax was supposed to be "temporary," which only a DURNFOOL would believe, NO tax is ever "temporary," there's always war, death, and murder involved in either in repealing one or in letting it die a natural death. Over and OVER and OVER again, it was "Let's tax ourselves to do X, which will draw people in, and they will spend money, and that way we'll get the sales taxes to do streets, fire, police, and so forth."

I've been hearin' that stuff all my LIFE an' it ain't never happened as promised YET.

When I started hearin' it about downtown, I darn near threw up. Them yokels wanted me to believe that by building some dadgum arena downtown, "business" would be revitalized downtown and the whole cotton-pickin' city would somehow magically be reborn as a utopian metropolis--with good roads, too!

Well, "business," if by "business," you mean "bars and restaurants" did spring up downtown, an' I ain't knockin' it. But I have noticed and continue to notice that the rest of the city continues on in much the same fashion it has for the 37 of my years that I have lived in it. The "build a bunch of watering holes downtown approach" has, from my perspective, been a distinct failure as regards most of the city.

And yet every stinkin' time I turn around, there's some other yahoo out there seems to think that if ONLY we had a few more places to wet one's whistle, then Tulsa would be an okay place to live.

Heck with THAT. Been there, done that, it ain't worth a tinker's...ah...cuss.

Just my two cents, written in a hurry. Hope it didn't ruffle no feathers too much.