If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against

If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against it --- least of all more "make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow." Allowing itself to incur damage to low-value buildings whose owners can barely afford to maintain them sounds like a self-inflicted wound. Even in spite of this recent extraction boom, schools are operating four days a week instead of five. What's going on is resource extraction exploitation with the costs externalized --- plain and simple. It's incomprehensible. That place needs to modernize and adapt but without petroleum and its trappings. It's had 35-50 years to adapt from these changes; why should I believe that petroleum will be this place's saviour again? I grew up with pumpjacks operating down the street (their ambient background sound as natural as the crickets and katydids and cicadas). The smell of petroleum, too. It wasn't until I moved away and returned to see how unnatural this was.