This Town Is Just A...

Randomly humorous stuff, at least I thought it was funny- well, it's Friday, I figured we could use a little levity. Especially around here- I think this town has been weighing a bit on me lately. It seems Lawton is everything that's wrong with military towns. True, all military towns, like all military posts, look the same. Actually, some military posts are actually very nice. Fort Sill is a comparatively smaller post, at least in terms of housing areas and community. This is probably due to the fact that most of the area is devoted to artillery, which requires a fairly large impact area, and when there's large heavy inert or explosive things falling from the sky, obviously you can't have people wandering around there. Though this does not actually dissuade people from going out there in a truck, a southern practice known as 'muddin'. Often muddin' is the preferred route to get to a fishing or hunting area off the beaten path. This makes perfect sense to me. Driving through an area with big signs that say 'artillery impact area'- not so much. Well, on the upside you might not have to actually shoot the deer. Or butcher it, or worry about how you're going to get ground venison out of the deer, for that matter.

But this is largely beside the point. Fort Sill is a smaller post, and does have a strong bond among families of service members stationed there. This is true for the surrounding area too, everyone kind of knows everyone in the unit. There are the occasional catfights between Army wives, though I'm afraid that would indicate that the majority of military wives are catty and dramatic- actually they're just like everyone else, kind of a mixed bag of people. Lawton itself, however, is a shining example of poor civic planning. Without the post, this place would just about literally vanish off the map. There is no other industry to speak of, and the local civic leaders do nothing at all to foster a sense of community. Basically, Lawton is the ghetto of Fort Sill. If Fort Sill was, say, Philadelphia, Lawton would be the South Side. Lawton excels in the area of pawn shops, loan sharking and bars, however. Most of the social traffic finds its way to Oklahoma City during the weekends, as there is very little going on around Lawton in the public sense. People will generally congregate at a house, or the barracks. Add to this the fact that the town does very little beyond keeping the roads at a bare minimum of workability, provides no real jobs to speak of, and no incentives at all to attract new businesses, and you've got a ghost town in the making when and if the post ever closes. I tend to think the mentality of the town is that they don't really need to do anything- the post provides sufficient revenue to keep everyone in their municipal jobs, and inertia takes care of the rest. Surrounding the more or less center of town is ranch land or farm land, and beyond that, more of the same in the nearby towns. This, of course, is a good use for the wide-open areas around here, just don't stop and pet the buffalo. I suppose beyond the town center it's kind of a catch-22, that the ranching that goes on there actually does require a good deal of land for grazing animals, so developing it would be a mistake.

In other news, looks like Westboro Baptist Church made the news again. I doubt the veracity of that name, seeing as they are not Baptist by any stretch of the imagination, though I suppose the term Church can apply to any group with a religious nature, no matter how monumentally stupid they are. This time around it's the recent razing of Joplin, Missouri by a tornado. The death toll is placed at 125 people, and in rolls the few, the proud, the hate mongers. There are actually very few people in this church, primarily immediate family members. Interestingly, this is a fairly valid argument against evolution... At any rate,. apparently God sent this tornado because the US is supportive of homosexuality. It's not a very well-defined concept here- who does the supporting, and in what way that's done are not entirely clear. But apparently God decides to toss out a random disaster now and again just to remind his faithful followers of something- again, not entirely clear. Well, I don't think I need to recap what this particular organization gains media notoriety for- here's what interests me: the fact that they do gain media notoriety. Is it really breaking news that a bunch of mentally unbalanced people go to wave signs proclaiming their hate for the world at large? The people at Westboro seem to me, first and foremost, to be vulgar in the extreme. I dislike vulgarity in any form. Though I'm known to utter the occasional cuss word, there's usually a reason for it, usually because I'm either falling off of something, getting hit with something, or getting injured in some way. (These things happen more often than you might think- those who know me well, maybe not more often than you might think). Yet this is seeming to be deliberately vile and disgusting. To what end, I wonder? The media attention? I can see why this is- putting these people on the air or in print does nothing to justify them or make them look legitimate- what it does do is give us someone to hate- part freak show, part pariah, part outlet, the coverage depicts these people just as deranged as they are in real life, if not more so. Web stories generate a flurry of comments, but one struck me- to paraphrase, it said simply, why is this news? Who are these jokers, and why are they in the news? Who cares? It's pretty well established that they go out, wave signs and make themselves look like fools, apparently reveling in the angry reactions they produce from people. In this light, this looks like nothing more than a desperate cry for attention. Which, unfortunately, it seems they get in spades. Now, there are people who go out and show their support for the same things that these people protest, though they don't really seem to have a clear message of protest- the funerals of soldiers (the last I heard, they can no longer do this), natural disasters and tragedies. Many people come out to show their support and sympathy for others, which is often a selfless act. Contrast this with the selfish, attention-grabbing, trying-to-get-a-rise that we see from these people.
My thoughts on this are- ignore them. They hide behind the law, which does indeed grant them freedom of speech and expression. This is one of the reasons why they must stay a distance from military funerals, however- they cannot interfere with the rights of the family to have their loved one buried with respect and dignity. Yet neither can they be interfered with. It seems to me that to even acknowledge anything other than their right to be there is to sink to their level. Do you talk to the cockroaches in the dumpster, telling them to stay out of your house, trying to reason with them and explain why they shouldn't go into your house? The same thing applies here. Personally, I tend to ignore bugs, except if they are in the house. Well, about the only thing here are spiders, who like to get inside. I let them out, because that's where all the bugs are- not in the house, and the fact that there are spiders outside seem to contribute to the absence of bugs. But these people are little more than cockroaches- not that this is a character judgement, their actions and choices define them as such. Why waste your time chasing them around, when it's easier just to ignore them, let them spew filth, and look like nothing more than what they seem to be? Why look for ugliness in the world, when there is beauty here as well?