Why aren’t the news cameras showing the wrecking balls and diggers swarming the S. Robinson underpass? Perhaps the lap-dog local media doesn’t have the stomach for it? Perhaps the lap-dog local reporters don’t want to countenance the destruction for which they, themselves have so long run interference?

In Oklahoma, “mere vandals” would be thrown in jail for spray-painting their stuff on the straight, strong and true walls of the Robinson and Walker underpasses — if they could be caught. The real criminals, however, empty-headed highway lobby puppets like Gary Ridley, David Streb and John Bowman, “get a raise.”

It’s hard not to conclude that this generation of heedless, materialistic, easily-led Oklahomans richly deserves the destruction of irreplaceable gifts of their great-grandparents’ generation like Union Station’s rail facility. They deserve “another ODOT expressway” — new bridge piers sunk into ancient acid-sludge pits, concrete on the ugly “screwed tombstone bridge decoration” already cracking up and blowing away.

But do our children and grandchildren deserve it?

It only took 18 years for the city (and Devon) to prove this point. Something like MAPS can be a turning point, albeit a long time in coming. Maybe we can learn from our past and continue moving forward.