In recent days, the national media has been reporting on an ongoing occurrence in the Oklahoma City area in which restaurateur Sean Cummings has been paying off school lunch debts of underprivileged students at local schools from funds that have been donated to honor his late wife Cathy, who passed away several months ago at the young age of 62. Cathy Cummings also operated a restaurant, “Vito’s Italian Ristorante” that was attached to Sean’s Irish pub on May Avenue in Oklahoma’s capital city. In addition to being successful restaurateurs, Sean and Cathy Cumming’s were also committed political activists who ran for political office on the Democratic ticket and where fixtures at that party’s gatherings where they advocated for humane and inclusive politics that sought to bring people together in a time of rancorous division. In addition to those students relieved of debt for lunches, her legacy also includes a younger generation of Democratic Party candidates who may have been inspired by her style of leadership who are seeking elective office in the Oklahoma City area and are offering less divisive approaches to public policy issues that are designed to bring people together rather than to foster division. On recent Saturdays a group of young people have departed the law office of Senator Michael Brooks Jimenez armed with leaflets that tell of a young attorney affiliated with that firm, Sam Wargin Grimaldo, who is currently a candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate District 46 post, and the policies that he advocates and would pursue as a member of that legislative body. They include a proposal that would allow all residents of the state of the statutory age to obtain driver’s licenses, and as his campaign literature points out, many other states across the nation have already done so, and that car insurance rates have dropped precipitously for those jurisdictions as a result.
During the height of the Cold War an intelligence officer in England who was tasked with routinely reviewing Soviet propaganda productions for the purpose of possibly unearthing clues to Russian spying, saw fit to stop and rerun a scene from a grainy Soviet newsreel that had featured a celebration of the anniversary of the fall of Berlin in 1945. The ceremony had included Russian military and diplomatic officers from throughout Europe, and the alert British intelligence officer had noticed that a Russian ambassador had saluted a diplomatic official who held the more minor post of an attache to a European state, and she deduced from that the attache, despite his minor posting, was in fact a Soviet KGB officer who outranked ambassadors in the Soviet hierarchy, and the discovery of his actual identity led to the unmasking of a high level British intelligence officer who was in fact a Russian agent. And a somewhat similar discovery was made by a woman in Enid, Oklahoma, Connie Schmidt Vickers, who was watching a news report of the infamous gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia in which torch bearing right-wingers had defiantly chanted “blood and soil” and realized that one of the participants had recently been elected to the Enid city council, and she and several of her colleagues had immediately begun a recall effort that eventually resulted in his recall by the citizens of his district. And hopefully leaders such as Grimaldo and Vickers will in turn inspire another generation of leaders of a humane and tolerant approach to the issues that confront us as a society.
Against the Grain 