The editorial page of the Daily Oklahoman noticed Y2k today.
"Doomsday Doubts: Are Y2k forecasts 2B believed?
Doomsday Doubts: Are Y2k Forecasts 2B Believed?
The sum of the editorial's "evidence" is a headline in the Wall
Street Journal: "Y2k: Apocalypse Not." Well, I certainly hope
all these smart folks making all these "bump in the road"
predictions are right. But we have to just take their word for
it, as this state's media -- led by the Daily Oklahoman -- have
done little more than uncritically report press releases from big
corporations and politicians. They've been more like Izvestia and
Pravda in the old Soviet Union than independent defenders of the
common good. I always thought that the First Amendment levied
responsibilities as well as rights, but I guess down at the Daily
Oklahoman they prefer to take the rights but forget the
concomittant responsibilities.
Congressman Horn's website still lists Medicaid and food stamps
as non-y2k compliant. The state's Y2k task force says that
Medicaid and food stamps are fine. Is Horn's chart therefore
just politics? Chopped liver? What?
We won't find the answer to this question in the Oklahoman. That
paper and its owners wouldn't waste any tears on those programs
anyway. Their general attitude towards the poor is that we
should do everything we can to make life as miserable as possible
for them so that they will thereby be encouraged to leave the
state. If the food stamp program did go down due to a Y2k
problem, the Daily Oklahoman would probably run an editorial
rejoicing that a bunch of lazy people will thereby be encouraged
to work harder.
I think G.K. Chesterton's quote from an earlier era is relevant:
"It is easy enough to say the cultured man should be the crowd's
guide, philosopher and friend. Unfortunately, he has nearly
always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and a very shallow
philosopher. And the actual catastrophes we have suffered, have
not in historical fact been due to the prosaic practical people
who are supposed to know nothing, but almost invariably to the
highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything. The
world may learn by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mis
takes of the learned."
Robert Waldrop
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Archbishop Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, Oklahoma City
Justice and peace meditations on the daily lectionary readings
-- robert waldrop (rmwj@soonernet.com), December 12, 1999