On Making A Stink: Oklahoma HB 1895 And The Youngs

By On January 31, 2013 · 2 Comments

someone needs to learn a thing or two about neckwear geezLook, y’all. I truly, madly, deeply care about arts funding in Oklahoma. I really do. And because of the nature of my Internet bubble, I saw the news about HB1895 and the dude who introduced it and his weird mission to de-fund arts programs in Oklahoma, and I thought to myself, “I really hope that doesn’t pass. In fact, I hope some other group takes this up and makes a lil’ stink about it so that it doesn’t, in fact, pass.” I thought that! But here I am, making frustrated noises at the precise people who made that very successful stink.

After the past several days, I can say with certainty that young, social media-savvy Oklahomans have the energy, intelligence, passion, and willpower to execute a grassroots media campaign protesting a specific piece of legislation. A specific piece of legislation, in fact, that because of its very nature has engendered discussions rife with the rhetoric of social justice. I drew a maddening conclusion: everything is and has been in place for us to create mass movements for justice in Oklahoma. I do not imagine that our resources are inexhaustible – picking battles is still wise.

And I harbor no illusions that speaking out against HB1895 is as politically difficult as advocating for abortion care or contraceptive access. But you, the privileged creative class of Oklahoma, are notorious for defensively hoarding social/political capital, throwing other residents of the state under the bus over and over to gain Internet cynicism cred, eyerolling, “hell-hole”-ing*, and apologizing for “Oklahoma” as if we have control over Sally Kern’s homophobia and Jim Inhofe’s climate denialism.

The campaign to stop HB1895 has been an education, perhaps teaching those who participated that contributing to struggles for justice pays back. HB1895 will not make it out of committee. As a very real bonus: you’ve felt power – not of being recognized for individual accomplishments, but of contributing noise to a massive and powerful din.

Rescuing arts education is undeniably a more mediagenic cause than defeating fetal personhood and parental consent laws. However, recent events have disproved my long-held belief that red state activism receives less attention because of its defensive nature. Defeating unjust state legislation is not particularly attention-grabbing, even though nothing could be more dramatically important to our state’s most vulnerable residents.  Also, yes, Rep. Cockroft is incompetent, but Rep. James Lankford is straight-up detestable plus: not even afraid to air his detestability in public. And he has a Twitter account.

*”‘hell-hole’-ing” is a term I just made up to describe the exhausting phenomenon of Oklahomans referring to their only home state as a hell-hole.

Pearl had two paragraphs of a single extended metaphor about overwatering succulents and she deleted them so you can thank her on twitter for that

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  • Phoenexx

    One thing you do have to keep in mind:  people who participate as creators in the arts of Oklahoma aren’t necessarily pro-choice, though that’s what artsy stereotypes could lead one to believe.
    We ["liberal" activists within the arts] “make noise” about other things as well,
    but even then it’s not heard (even by you, someone who agrees with us,
    evidently).  We’ve protested on the steps against “personhood,” but you
    think that, for some reason, when we get a quick little slogan around
    and plaster it on social media, that makes more of a difference than our
    signs and our screams and our chants (plus the social media we put out
    about women’s right to choose and the closings of the planned parenthood
    clinics)?
    The arts is an easier thing to save in Oklahoma so it may be made more public by media coverage than something that goes against the tenants of the current Oklahoman administration.
    As for calling us “the privileged creative class of Oklahoma,” I’d love to know how we are such.  If you are indeed still referring to the “young, social media-savvy Oklahomans” who took up this cause, I don’t know of any of us that are also “privileged.”  We graduated into a double-dip recession during which most of us have been laid off multiple times; we’ve had no chance to start careers within our fields until only recently, thanks to the job loss we’ve all been suffering; and we’re notoriously ignored on issues we protest, until now.  Just because you saw this one doesn’t mean we’ve done a good job; it means the media believes that this is something that fits their current propaganda model and can be nicely spread as a cute, hopeful story that will have a good ending.  And for once, they’re right.
    Try checking out COBRA on Facebook if you’re looking for activism leads.

    • http://www.facebook.com/pearLOLsen Pearl Olsen

      Hi Phoenexx, thanks for commenting! If you read our blog regularly, you probably know that we do most of our blogs “letter-to-the-editor” style and try to just focus on one aspect of one topic. You probably also know that we organize and cover IRL activism all the time. So don’t worry, we appreciate on-the-steps/on-the-ground demonstrations, because we plan and execute them on a regular basis.

      To address your concern about my use of the word “privileged” – I’m using it here as it is commonly used in social justice writing, from blogs to academia. That is, it doesn’t refer to one’s current financial situation, it refers to social/de facto privileges such as white privilege and male privilege, even class privilege, where “class” refers to a context-based social status rather than individual wealth. In this post and on our blog in general, “privilege” is often used to indicate levels of access to resources based on systemic/structural power differentials. I hope that helps!