Tag: Oklahoma
Another Losing Season Notched in that “Tradition”
Among the dumbest arguments against changing the Washington team's mascot has been that that would mean Oklahoma would have to change its name. Idiots. But a simple epiphany revealed on a Harrisonburg radio talk show captures the kind of lightbulb moments that will lead to the inevitable outcome.
One morning a fellow on WSVA 550 who had been on the fence about the controversy announced he had changed his opinion about the team name. The conversion came while watching a rerun of an old Daniel Boone television series episode. The story centered on a Native American child that was being enrolled in the frontier school. The telling scene was when the youth approached and was peppered by his classmates with clearly derogatorily intended pejoratives including the "R" word. In context and told by a series that originally aired in an era when we were much more embarrassed by our prejudices, the true message and meanness of the term rang out.
"...it has ties to a time when bounties were paid for the scalps of American Indians...it is a racial slur like any other racial slur that we wouldn't print in the pages of a family newspaper." - The Oklahoman Online
At about the same time, those "insensitive" Oklahomans in one school district were deciding to remove that nickname from the teams at Capitol Hill High School in Oklahoma City despite "tradition." You see Oklahomans, in a state named for the red people, can distinguish the difference.
Freak Floods? Or The New Normal?
Just weeks after flooding in Tennessee, Kentucky & Mississippi killed at least 31 people, floods in Arkansas killed at least 20 people this week. And today, parts of Oklahoma City have gotten over 9 inches of rain. An Oklahoma City official told CNN, "Areas are flooding that have never flooded before."
Should we keep calling these "freak floods" or "extreme weather"? Or, given that these kinds of severe storms are exactly what climate scientists have been predicting as a consequence of global warming, do we have to re-adjust what we consider "normal"?
As Brad Johnson tweeted, welcome to the Anthropocene.