To my fellow Okies: I heard that some of us want to secede from the United States mostly because of the fact we (read: they) re-elected Barack Hussein Obama as our (read: their) President. This seems like a pretty good idea because I think Oklahoma would fare pretty well on our own.

At the time of writing this, almost 17,000 people have signed a petition on www.petitions. whitehouse.gov to “Peacefully grant the State of Oklahoma to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.”

As I wonder what this means, I submit some ideas for our “new” government:

We obviously need a leader of some sort — a figurehead — and since Mr. Obama won’t be ours, I suggest Barry Switzer.

Everyone loves Barry Switzer. I mean sure, his dad was arrested for being a bootlegger back in the day and Barry himself was arrested for trying to take a gun on a plane back in 1997 (according to the New York Times) but that’s just the kind of leader our state/new country needs — a real American. Wait, I mean a real Oklahoman — even though he was born in Arkansas. Then again, I haven’t seen his birth certificate.

Enough with this democracy business, it has run its course! We are all Republicans here, so who needs the Dems? This will make things like voting and decision making obsolete because that’s how we vote — red all the way, a true Red Dirt Republic. I mean, even the name Oklahoma is a Choctaw phrase for “red people.”

I don’t think America would miss us much anyway. Oklahoma is traditionally on the wrong end of many state rankings: teen pregnancy, female incarceration, obesity and education — problems we can definitely handle on our own.

And who decided we should leave peacefully? With as many strapped up, open-carrying sharpshooters as we have around here, we can at least take over Kansas and Nebraska with ease. Do people actually live in North and South Dakota? We can take them too, creating a strip right down the United States, separating the east and the west (Texas is wanting to secede as well and already has 108,000 signatures.)

Wait a second. A small part of being an Oklahoman is being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, shake off the red dust and keep on doing what you do without complaints. It’s understandable to have opinions and things to believe in and to be passionate about, but to pout when things don’t go your way and want to secede from the U.S.?

America isn’t a place where if you don’t like what is going on, you throw your hands up and storm off. It’s great to be political and to stand up for the things you believe in but this? Secession?

Things going on in a White House in a city far away don’t have nearly as much effect on us as we would like to believe. We can survive, at the very least, together as Oklahomans.

—Mitchell Richards

Special Projects Reporter

To contact Mitchell Richards, email staffwriter4@occc.edu.