ABOUTWHERE WE PUT THE OLD STUFF
OKIE VALUES

It hit me recently, while I was browsing my appointment calendar, that my birth state, Oklahoma, will have its
centennial in 2007.  It was a shocking moment to realize how much I remembered of the bi-centennial celebrations
of 1957.  Time flies when you’re having fun.

My maternal grandmother came to the Oklahoma Territory, via covered wagon, in the early days of the last century.  
I called her “a daughter of the prairie” in her eulogy in 1978.  You know, someone who was born before the year
1900 and lived long, in the United States of America (even if “Indian Territory” wasn’t part of it then), observed
amazing times.  She saw this country go from wide open spaces to very crowded places before she turned 60.  She
saw the development of technological wonders: Automobiles, Airplanes, Space Travel, Radio & Television, and yes,
even Teflon.

She, like her newspaper man husband, was a Democrat.  I think about 90% of Oklahomans were until the 1960s.  
Oklahoma’s favorite son, Will Rogers, was one of her idols and she loved to use his most famous political quote,
when election time rolled around.  “I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”

She has to be rolling over in her grave and thinking how much the smell, inside her coffin, resembles the stench
of the “core values” around which her democrat party is now so well organized: socialized medicine, corporate &
individual welfare, marriage of gays, (though she probably would ask “what are gays?), amnesty to 20 million illegal
immigrants (who  unlike her mom & dad didn’t come though Ellis Island), progressive taxation which has the top
60% paying it all and the other 40% paying nothing (commie bastards she’d say), and worst of all, judgeships to
people who support crushing a baby’s head just before it’s born and calling it an abortion (she loved babies,
yellow, white, black, or brown).

She came to me in a dream the other night and told me that she had considered asking me to go vote for her in the
next election for anyone who didn’t believe in any such things.  I told her that that meant I couldn’t vote democrat.  
She said she understood.

I also told her that voting for dead people was still illegal and that I could go to jail.  She said she thought Richard
Daly Sr. had had a lot of ward healers in Cook County, Illinois do it and he never went to jail.  I said, I know
grandma, but I, and my republican friends, try to go by the rules like you taught me.  She then said she understands
why I’m a conservative republican and to keep up the good work with that MOVE-OVER.org Internet thing.  I knew
she didn’t even know what that was, and I woke up.

In life she taught me really good values and God Bless Her for it.!

Mike Sharq
MOVE-OVER.org