The ugly American -- Thoughts on the Oklahoma City bombing's 20th

Thoughts on the Oklahoma City bombing’s 20th

Ghastly events become unwanted mileposts in our lives.

Thankfully, our lives are sprinkled with the personal highlights that connect us to family and friends. They're the traditional birthdays (becoming a teenager, getting the driver's license, reaching legal drinking age and, ugh, qualifying to join the AARP), marriages, births, deaths of parents, children graduating high school and moving out -- all those individualized events that measure the passing days far intimately than days marked on a calendar.

What’s the point?

Fanaticism is at the root of terrorism, and it can be nurtured at home and abroad. It takes intentional efforts by all Americans to contain its impact.

Then there are the shared events almost everyone gets to be a part of. Welcome are the unifying moments such as marking the nation's birth on July 4 or a particularly stirring rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" a la Whitney Houston before the 1991 Super Bowl. The hope of seeing a new president inaugurated. The thrill of an improbable victory by a overmatched U.S. ice hockey team in the Olympics.

Those are glorious moments to be savored.

But there are the tragic ones, too. They wedge themselves into the story of our lives, invading the emotional space without invitation. As much as we'd like to wipe them from our memory banks, like a wish they had never happened at all, we cannot.

Today is April 19, 2015. It is now 20 years since a ripped-apart building in downtown Oklahoma City became a symbol of homegrown distrust of government, the lengths to which a man or woman obsessively devoted to a cause will go and the damage a lack of human compassion and empathy can have.

For most of us, the first time we ever heard of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was after nearly a third of it was obliterated. The 1977 structure was named after an Oklahoman who was one of the youngest federal judges in U.S. history in 1936, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt. But it infamy came through its destruction.

Two men -- Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols -- waged war on the United States on that chilly April morning. Both former U.S. soldiers, they had become disillusioned with the federal government and viewed it as an enemy of Americans. The intensity of their anti-government views expanded in the wake of the FBI's deadly 1992 Ruby Ridge, Idaho, standoff with a family who believed biblical end times were approaching and the 1993, 51-day standoff with the Branch Davidian religious sect near Waco, Texas, that ended in an inferno that killed 76 people.

The Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground on April 19, 1993. McVeigh's and Nichols' attack in Oklahoma City was designed as a response to the federal government precisely two years later. McVeigh selected the Murrah Building, which housed regional offices of such federal agencies as the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound.

McVeigh and Nichols loaded a Ryder truck with a massive explosive mixture. McVeigh drove it into the city and parked it in a drop-off area directly under the building's day-care center, and lit two fuses. The blast and aftermath killed 168 people, injured more than 600 and damaged more than 300 other buildings.

Conventional wisdom immediately turned attention to terrorism from the Middle East, but federal investigators quickly traced the conspiracy to these misguided American men. That added even more shock to the appalling murders -- the killers were fellow Americans.

How could this be? What kind of diabolical thinking can develop a justification for so much intentional bloodshed, even from the tiniest of souls? Remember that heart-wrenching image of the firefighter carrying 1-year-old Baylee Almon's limp body from the carnage?

In 2015, 14 years after international fanatics brought murderous destruction to new heights with the attacks in New York and Washington, it's scary that scale of the destruction in Oklahoma City might seem in any way small. It was massive. It was THE terrorist act of its time, and few could conceive of anything bigger coming along. How heartbreaking that it did.

Twenty years have past. Somewhere around 45 million people alive in the United States today were born after McVeigh and Nichols, with the help of a supporting cast of anti-government fanatics, committed their heinous act. To them, it's as much a part of the history books as the Civil War or the Great Depression or the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For those old enough at the time to remember, the explosion blasted its way into our memories, joining the category of ones we'd just as soon not have.

What we know today in this age of terrorism is the enemy is not one race or nationality or religion or ideology. McVeigh and Nichols suffered the same malady as instigators of violence in the name of some larger purpose regardless of their roots. The sickness is fanaticism.

The birthplace of fanaticism is intolerance, for other ideas or voices. It is nurtured by obsessive obstinance, an unwillingness to consider for a moment one's stance might be wrong. It is fueled by an unquenchable desire to force others to see one answer is the only answer.

In 2015, it's an industry. Some talk radio voices constantly scream into their microphones that listeners should consider virtually all governmental activity as an infringement on freedom. Our elected leaders appear to have given up on setting examples of statesmanship, replacing reasonable compromise with blatant manipulation of the nation's business for political purposes. People with whom we have political disagreements can't be viewed as simply taking a different stance; their very morality must come into question.

Fanaticism is the enemy. Giving into it is to surrender our humanity and compassion.

The response to the Oklahoma City bombing contained the ingredients to the antidote. Thousands of rescue workers descended on the blast site to search for survivors, then to recover loved ones for proper funerals. The nation poured out its resources to help those affected by the tragedy. The world shared in mourning and in praying for peace.

The world has always had, and will always have, the fanatics willing to do anything for a misguided cause. The rest of us need to consistently look for ways to give back, to be active in our communities, to inspire debate without anger, to call out someone whose offhand remark makes light of violence or excuses it.

The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building showed us what evil intentions can achieve. Such acts of violence work their ways into our consciences, but will they be allowed to advance the ideas of their instigators?

It takes a lot of people intentionally committed to peace, understanding and engagement to counter such violence.

The question worth asking regularly is this: What kind of American will you be?

Commentary on 04/19/2015

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