Oklahoma: Oppression Is Relative

Oklahoma is easily as corrupt as any other state, but there are other limits which make it a sane place to live.
We are one of the few states which has encoded the basic right to ignore a policeman who is plainly wrong. It may be tough to prove in court later, but there is a presumption some people out there do know things the police do not, and that some policemen can be suffering at least temporarily from a lack of reason. More than once, during our all-too-often natural disasters, police have demanded I do something, or refrain from something, based on utterly fallacious information. One tried to tell me there were no houses where I was living, and I had just left the house. But overall, I’ve found them mostly reasonable during encounters, pointedly refusing to enforce the full letter of the law when it simply missed the point.
This reflects a powerful cultural assumption here which surprises most people. Our politicians are as slimy as they come, but voters still mean something here. They get what they want by corrupting the voting process itself, and I would never trust it. But it takes only a small amount of public notice from obscure sources to get them sweating bullets. You can bet some of our LEOs would love to push the same crap going around other states, particularly in regards to fusion centers and tracking “possible terrorists” but the power and money here won’t dare buy into it, because they’ll lose the power and the money.
We still have serious troubles with cover-ups of crime, such as the murder of Terry Yeaky to shut him up about how the Murrah Bombing was an inside job. We now have several native-born federales who resigned the positions and came home to take up powerful positions here and make sure the cover story stays in place. There are plenty of other federal cover stories unraveling all the time. I can find any number of people who remember their own incredulity about the Medical Examiner losing all credibility when he changed his official report to match the impossible lie told by the feds about Jesse Trentedue’s death in his cell at the federal detention center out at the airport. Near as anyone can tell, the feds mistook Trentadue for the John Doe with Tim McVeigh.
There is no place on this earth where you can hope to escape all of this crap, but there are a few places where the evil can’t quite grab full control.