Like many others of Generation X, I can tell you where I was when the Challenger blew up, when Chernobyl had its disastrous near-meltdown, and when the Berlin Wall fell. I can also tell you where I was on the morning of April 19, 1995.
I was at home asleep.
My living arrangements had taken a turn. My brother's girlfriend was due to have their baby in May. He was a contractor and worked all hours of the day (and drank, at that time, for many hours of the night). I was employed as a hotel night auditor, and had just signed up for paralegal courses in hopes of getting something better. Our mother moved in that month to help us prepare for raising a kid, as his girlfriend had broken off their relationship--but, she said, we could take care of the baby while she found other living arrangements. (That took her 2 years, but that's another diary.)
So after working the night shift and coming home at 7:00 a.m., I collapsed, fully clothed, into bed, only to have my brother burst into my room just after 9:00 a.m.
"Listen, sweetie, get up," he said. "Some nutcase just blew up a building."
"Where, here?" I raised my head, alarmed. We'd been through the Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake together; I had a feeling that someone had tried to take out the L.A. courthouse, or maybe the Times building.
"No, somewhere in Oklahoma."
"Okay," and I collapsed back in bed. I didn't have the energy to get up.
But ten minutes later, Mom came in my room and pulled me upright. "You've got to see this," she informed me, her face as grim as I'd ever seen it. That woke me up. "Someone bombed a building with little kids in Oklahoma City."
I went to the living room and sat down on the couch, where I barely moved from 9:15 a.m. till 10:50 p.m., watching ABC's coverage of the Murrah Federal Building attack. At that stage, rumors had it that Jordanian or perhaps Palestinian terrorists had bombed us. I still remember the story of a Jordanian man who was detained at a nearby airport on suspicion of committing the crime.
I also remember, as information poured in, that news anchors apologized once it became clear that this was a case of domestic terrorism.
"It's not Jerusalem. It's not Baghdad. It's not Bolivia. It's Oklahoma."
--V.Z. Lawton, Federal office worker & survivor, Newsweek, May 1, 1995.
The images are permanently burned into my brain. I drove my mother to work that day, and the Los Angeles Times had printed a special edition that showed firefighter Chris Fields carrying the broken body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon. An older gentleman held a copy of it in his hands and sobbed, tears streaming. Mom put a hand on his shoulder, her own tears beginning to pour. "I know," she told the man. "I know."
Going back home, I saw no one on the streets--everyone was indoors, near a TV or a radio, listening to the news. I got on the Internet briefly to see if any friends I had might have been harmed, and found one woman who was trying to find her own friends who were employed there. They were found, not alive. I remember feeling sick, wondering if whoever had done this might try to do it again--and what they hoped to get out of it.
Wednesday was a long night. Thursday was worse. By then the search dogs were beginning to find nothing but corpses, and were growing depressed; so were most of the people I talked to when I went back to work Thursday night. My guests hung around the lobby, drinking coffee, not wanting to go to their rooms; they were mostly business travelers and truck drivers who'd been through the Midwest. They couldn't stop talking about the individual stories they'd heard on TV. One thing I do recall is that no one faulted the media. They praised reporters for not jumping to conclusions about who did the deed. They praised them for treating the families of survivors and the dead with respect.
But what really struck me was that people wanted to know where they could send help. How they could help. Two truck drivers I knew wanted to gather up food and clothes and take it to Oklahoma City if they could manage the run. Many of us called the Red Cross to give blood, donate money, or see what else we could do. No one said that the victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or blamed the government for egging on the men responsible for this act. No one complained that black victims were given more time than white victims, or vice versa.
What I remember most about Oklahoma City was that, on that day and for years afterward, the survivors, the dead, and the families of both were held in respect and grieved for by nearly everyone I met. There was no blame assigned, no demand to impose guilt on the victims--just a painful acceptance that an evil thing had been done, and needed to be redressed. If I may venture my opinion on the Oklahoma City National Memorial, I'd say that it was built as much for the rest of us who witnessed it on TV as it was for those who lived through it. It was a shared tragedy that wounded all of us.
I not only have the Newsweek issue that covered the Oklahoma City bombing, I also have three days' worth of front pages from the New York Times that covered the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. An ad was placed in the Thursday, September 13th front page of the Times by the people of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It read:
You stood with us in our darkest hour, now, we stand with you.
It was a heartbreaking statement of solidarity. It was a gesture of unity that, coming after the bitterness of the 2000 Presidential election and the horror of 9/11, made me think that perhaps we as a country could join again, rediscover that our differences were nothing compared to our shared strengths and likenesses. We would discover the thread of being a far-flung family, and come together not only to help those wounded and mourning the dead, but also to find and punish those responsible.
And in what has to be one of the greatest acts of contemptible selfishness, George W. Bush took that goodwill and used it to attack a country for no other reason than to grab its resources and carry out a ridiculous, personal vendetta. He took the lesson of Oklahoma City and turned it into cynical, cheap propaganda, and it will take years before we recover from the damage he inflicted.
(ETA: Thanks for placing this on the Rescue List. It's completely unexpected. -G13)