Forever Changed
I recently watched all of the seasons of the show Saving Grace on Netflix and I was struck by the fact that, though my eldest sister has lived in Oklahoma City for something like 20 years, I never really considered how the events of April 19, 1995 had changed the lives of everyone in that city forever. The characters on the show, chiefly detectives in the OCPD, plus the family of Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter, the title character) all remember vividly the day the Murrah Building was bombed; everyone has either lost someone in the bombing (Grace lost her sister Mary Frances, who was also her nephew's mother, but other characters mention friends and family) or was involved in helping pull people/bodies from the rubble of the building (Grace, her brother the firefighter, other detectives). In one episode, when the detectives are walking carefully around a house (to avoid destroying evidence) and notice a clock on the wall set to 9:02, the reaction is, "A survivor lives here," because some people in and around Okalahoma City who were close to a person killed in the bombing do this in tribute, as 9:02 am was when the bomb went off. Grace is even said to have been present at Timothy McVeigh's execution.
We see in episode after episode how the people of OKC, OK have been forever changed by the events of that day. And yet many people outside of Oklahoma City do not remember it well now, a horrendous incident of domestic terrorism. My kids didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned the Oklahoma City Bombing to them; it's too recent to be mentioned in history class at school. (They were eight months and 30 months old when it occurred.)
OTOH, the events of April 19, 1995 didn't have the kind of fallout September 11, 2001 had. We didn't declare war based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction; we didn't use that war as an excuse to line the pockets of the defense industry, including the sitting vice-president (due to his connections to Halliburton); we didn't turn the terrorism into an excuse to profile and persecute a particular demographic in our population, despite the fact that the April 19 date was specifically used as a "dig" at our government for previous attempts to root out domestic terrorists (the Waco incident in particular) and despite the fact that, each year on April 19, our government isn't so much mourning the victims of the OKC bombing as on the highest alert level for new acts of domestic terrorism.
Just as April 19, 1995 changed the people of Oklahoma City, September 11, 2001 changed the entire country, and not in a good way. Six months after it happened I wrote and posted an afterword to Psychic Serpent that included a good run-down of where I was and what I was doing on that day, and especially the way the online Harry Potter community around the world rallied around its members in the US and offered words of love and encouragement and hope, but mainly solidarity. Oneness. A message of unity and togetherness that flies in the face of the splintering and factionalism that our government fomented from that day forward, a legacy that the current administration is fighting to an extent, but which is an uphill battle.
Here is what I wrote six months after the attacks. *
Just as the government must be on alert for attacks on April 19 every year now, we must also worry about new attacks each September 11, and in fact one was evidently thwarted with the capture of some men who, it seems, were hoping to blow up bridges leading into NYC today. Despite the sympathy and solidarity the world felt toward the US on the day of the attacks and in the days to follow, our actions in the ensuing ten years have not endeared us to anyone and have only made such new terror attempts more, not less likely.
If there's one thing I pray for it's that we find a way to repair the rift between our country and the rest of the world that has been created by our military and other reactions (such as profiling, Homeland Security, the TSA) to the events of ten years ago. We may have been attacked from without on that day, but since that time the damage we've been doing to our country has largely come from within. There may always now be pockets of terrorists around the world eager to see what they can do to make us doubt our safety; killing Osama Bin Laden wasn't going to fix that. But perhaps we can someday at least return to having the kind of allies we had then, who grieved with us and said, "Today, we are all Americans," without a trace of irony.
Someday.
* I haven't uploaded a new version of this file in a while and it still has smartquotes in it, so for some of it to display correctly you need to go to the "View" menu on your browser and select Western European to avoid having weird little boxes appear in places in the file where other characters should be.
We see in episode after episode how the people of OKC, OK have been forever changed by the events of that day. And yet many people outside of Oklahoma City do not remember it well now, a horrendous incident of domestic terrorism. My kids didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned the Oklahoma City Bombing to them; it's too recent to be mentioned in history class at school. (They were eight months and 30 months old when it occurred.)
OTOH, the events of April 19, 1995 didn't have the kind of fallout September 11, 2001 had. We didn't declare war based on a lie about weapons of mass destruction; we didn't use that war as an excuse to line the pockets of the defense industry, including the sitting vice-president (due to his connections to Halliburton); we didn't turn the terrorism into an excuse to profile and persecute a particular demographic in our population, despite the fact that the April 19 date was specifically used as a "dig" at our government for previous attempts to root out domestic terrorists (the Waco incident in particular) and despite the fact that, each year on April 19, our government isn't so much mourning the victims of the OKC bombing as on the highest alert level for new acts of domestic terrorism.
Just as April 19, 1995 changed the people of Oklahoma City, September 11, 2001 changed the entire country, and not in a good way. Six months after it happened I wrote and posted an afterword to Psychic Serpent that included a good run-down of where I was and what I was doing on that day, and especially the way the online Harry Potter community around the world rallied around its members in the US and offered words of love and encouragement and hope, but mainly solidarity. Oneness. A message of unity and togetherness that flies in the face of the splintering and factionalism that our government fomented from that day forward, a legacy that the current administration is fighting to an extent, but which is an uphill battle.
Here is what I wrote six months after the attacks. *
Just as the government must be on alert for attacks on April 19 every year now, we must also worry about new attacks each September 11, and in fact one was evidently thwarted with the capture of some men who, it seems, were hoping to blow up bridges leading into NYC today. Despite the sympathy and solidarity the world felt toward the US on the day of the attacks and in the days to follow, our actions in the ensuing ten years have not endeared us to anyone and have only made such new terror attempts more, not less likely.
If there's one thing I pray for it's that we find a way to repair the rift between our country and the rest of the world that has been created by our military and other reactions (such as profiling, Homeland Security, the TSA) to the events of ten years ago. We may have been attacked from without on that day, but since that time the damage we've been doing to our country has largely come from within. There may always now be pockets of terrorists around the world eager to see what they can do to make us doubt our safety; killing Osama Bin Laden wasn't going to fix that. But perhaps we can someday at least return to having the kind of allies we had then, who grieved with us and said, "Today, we are all Americans," without a trace of irony.
Someday.
* I haven't uploaded a new version of this file in a while and it still has smartquotes in it, so for some of it to display correctly you need to go to the "View" menu on your browser and select Western European to avoid having weird little boxes appear in places in the file where other characters should be.