Oklahoma City

Yesterday, on the spur of the moment, my wife and I decided to take a day-trip. We had gone out the night before with a group of neighbors for what we call our Ethnic Night Out, having had a delicious Ethiopian meal. After all that socializing, we decided we needed a day to ourselves.

I'm not sure how we decided on Oklahoma City, but that's where we decided to go. OKC is about 200 miles north of us, an easily-doable distance for a day trip. Of course, we didn't leave the house until about 10:00 am, so we didn't have quite the full day to make the trip. On the way, we stopped at the Oklahoma tourist information center on I-35 an picked up maps, brochures, etc. By the time we had stopped, we'd decided we would go to see the Oklahoma City National Museum & Memorial, dedicated to remembering the victims of the April 19, 1995 bombing in OKC. And so we did.

The memorial to the 168 victims of the Oklahoma City bombing surprised me. The magnitude of the attack and the sheer number of the victims was just overwhelming. Even though the number of victims was just a fraction of the number killed in the September 11 attacks, it was overwhelming to me. The empty chairs of the memorial, each one dedicated to one of the victims, take up such a large area of the outside portion of the memorial.

I only took a few photos (click on any photo for a larger image) outside, in the open-air portion of the memorial. Photos are not permitted inside, an expression of dignity for the victims' families, I suppose. As moving as the outdoor memorial is, the museum is even more moving and more disturbing. One component of the exhibit is a room in which visitors sit and listen to a 2 minute audio tape of a hearing that was taking place when the bomb went off. It is the only know sound recording of the bomb blast, and it brings a sickened feeling to one's gut to hear it.

Seeing the videos, audios, newspaper headlines, and reading the details of how McVeigh went about planning and then executing his plot made me realize just how vulnerable we are to the actions of psychopaths. It made me think, too, that we need not live with these monsters trying to kill us. If we'd only take them seriously, listen to their sick sense of justice, pay heed to their perceived injustices, we might be able to steer them into something less monstrous or, at least, get inside their heads and stop them from doing their deeds. I'd rather prevent someone from doing what McVeigh did (and bin Laden and on and on and on) than punish them after they succeed.


There are photos in that museum of every single person who died as a result of McVeigh's violent attack in April 1995. I just think of how horrific it must have been for their families to realize, in an instant, that their loved ones were dead, killed by a terrorist who didn't care about any of them. McVeigh could not have done what he did, indeed no terrorist could carry out their actions, if he had been able to see the victims as people, people who had friends and families and people who had no role in the terrorists' perceived injustice. A song that I heard many, many years ago and has stuck with me ever since came to mind when I saw the photos of the carnage in that museum. It's by Roger Miller: