Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City.
It amazes me that it's been that long.
In 1995, when it happened, I was still in my 20s. I was still in graduate school. I had just started working on the doctoral degree that would eventually be (in part) my ticket to a career here in Oklahoma. At the time, I had no idea I'd be moving to Oklahoma - no plans, really, beyond the vague "get my Ph.D. and then teach somewhere."
I remember we heard the news in the biostats class I was taking at the time. I tend not to think of things as being as bad as they actually are - I remember back in 1986, when one of my friends stopped me in the hall at my high school and told me that the Challenger had blown up, the first thing I said was "But they got the astronauts out safely, didn't they?". I think at the time I imagined the Murrah building bombing as being similar to the abortive 1993 World Trade Center bombing - a small number of people killed, a lot injured, but the building wasn't destroyed.
It wasn't until I got home for the day and saw the news coverage that I realized how bad it was. I particularly remember the harrowing newswire photo of a firefighter carrying a bloodied and badly-injured toddler out from the building.
And that's really the face of the victims of terrorism, isn't it? That the people who get hurt are ones who have nothing at all to do with whatever crazy cause the terrorists are trying to advance.
I can understand disagreeing with what the government does - believe me, over the years of my adult life, I've had my share of disagreements - but I can't understand wanting to kill people in order to make those disagreements known. I can't imagine believing that doing that would solve anything.
There's something about April. Famously, Eliot commented that it was the "cruellest month," though I'm inclined to think he meant more personal observations about that - seeing the spring progress and, especially as you get older, thinking about those who are no longer around to see the spring. The mixture of new life and mortality.
But it seems that a lot of horrible things in recent years happened in April. The Oklahoma City bombing. The shootings at Columbine. The shootings at Virginia Tech. And there may be others I'm forgetting. I'm not sure if it's random, if there's something about this time of year that brings serious problems in people that have them to a head, or if the two later killing sprees were in some way brought on by the memory of the first.
I suppose my problem is I'm trying to impose my own sane thought-patterns on the minds of people who don't have them - who very possibly didn't have a well-developed conscience (because, with a well-developed conscience, how could you justify killing children in a day-care? And McVeigh went to his death unrepentant. I can never look at the poem "Invictus" the same way again, after he quoted it before he was executed.)
It's sobering to think of how one person - or a small group of people - can change so many lives so horribly forever.
5 comments:
My own thinking, generally, is that if your desired end justifies any and all means, you've gone past the point of conscience and into the realm of pathology.
There's nothing wrong, for instance, with wanting to drop Henry Waxman into an active volcano. But actually kidnapping him to take him there - that's over the line.
My father was visiting me here in MN and he told me about it.
In the '70s, there had been a bombing at the courthouse in my little PA hometown and all that happened was windows breaking all around town. So that's what I imagined happened.
It wasn't until I watched the news much later that day that I realized what happened. Still such a sad day.
If the next question is "Was it possible to hear the blast from five miles away?" I can verify that yes, it was.
Today's newspaper mentioned a study on campus killings/shooting sprees and said they are most likely to occur in either October or April.
i had been working at a local restaurant, and had gone to a friend's house to wait for her so we could carpool to class (we were touring restaurants, and would go together).
i turned on her tv, and before i could change it to the foodnetwork, i saw the network news. i literally sat there and cried (at that time, i had 2 little ones so the picture of the firefighter made me cry). i couldn't believe it, and i was sitting there cursing whatever foreigner that hated the us so much. imagine my absolute shock when i found out it was "one of our own."
i heard they released a video of tim what's-his-bucket talking about what he did. sounds too much like glorifying him one more time.
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