Yes, I have heard the allegations that detainees at Diamondback Correctional Center are not receiving the medical care they seek. Yes, I have read the Frontier article detailing how the money generated by the facility is being divvied up.
I resent the implication that it is wrong to make money from detention, like it should be accomplished for free. And I had seen most of the numbers before, and I don’t think they are fair. I don’t think the community is receiving what it should when Oklahoma Department of Corrections is getting more than half a million dollars a month.
Some of the medical allegations are disturbing, too, but one line from the Frontier piece keeps coming back to me. It says, in loose terms, that most of the people in the facility have no criminal record. That isn’t quite accurate. By coming here without going through the process of immigrating legally, they broke our laws and they cheapened the work and time legal immigrants have spent to make lives here.
I have spoken at length with legal immigrants who went on to become citizens, and I have spoken to their loved ones. The process is lengthy and costly, and the citizenship test is so difficult I doubt many natural born citizens could pass it. Those folks who go through the work are tough, Oklahoma tough.
As I have traveled, that is one thing that others have frequently mentioned, how tough Okies are. I take it as a compliment.
There are many ways Oklahoma tough is illustrated, like the Cheese Festival. Fifty years! I know the festival is a little cheesy (see what I did there?) but that goes to show we can also laugh at ourselves.
But every year, with only two exceptions, the event has gone on. Heck, we have a festival even though we no longer have cheese. The town and the organizers and the festival vendors and those in attendance put their heads down and plowed through the handicap of a closed and relocated cheese factory when elsewhere folks might have thrown up their hands and called it quits.
Now, instead of ending at 50, the festival is reinventing itself with the assistance of the Plains Collective. The Tribes are taking their rightful place in the community, and we should be glad and thankful for their leadership and participation.
I am issuing a challenge to every resident of the town and the county. Make the effort to get out, go to the parade, see the vendors. Take some pride in our little burg because unlike too many others, we refused to quit. We keep on scrabbling to rise from what could be ashes and instead emerge as a community striving to be vibrant, attractive and livable.
That’s Oklahoma tough.