Today is April 19th. Twenty-six years ago today, at 9:02 AM a truck bomb, constructed by disgruntled ultra right wingers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, was detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Bldg in Oklahoma City. 168 people, including 19 children, were killed in the attack.
We Okies made a solemn vow after the bombing. This vow has been used other times in other incidents, but we will honor it every year.
Comments
Rising Again
The apparent rising again of that element in America has got to be disturbing to everyone in Oklahoma, if not the nation.
Today, it's much larger than a handful of zealots. Contact your elected leaders, tell them you're worried, and you remember where it leads. Ask what they're doing about it.
pain
I debated writing a comment here. I decided it was too painful to go into. I am commenting just to note that pain. I want to thank you for posting, I want to thank you for helping us remember that such acts never lead to the result those planning them intended. No matter how many times we have to live through them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents
Your friend
Crash
The worst form of terrorism
is committed against your own people. It was a dreadful thing to happen to all those people and quite right that you should remember them.
Angharad
Shocking Incident.
Was a motive ever established for the bombing? A short bit of on line research indicates that the Waco massacre's, and the Ruby Ridge killing were part of it. One would like to think that our Government will never commit excesses against us again. I would hope they wouldn't but I live next door to the Immigration Center that has been the trigger for so many demonstrations.
Michigan Militia
The group from which Nichols and McVeigh came was headquartered in a gun shop not far from me. I have had co-workers who were members. The shop folded not long after the bombing but the rhetoric continues, not surprisingly often around a coffee pot in a gun store. Their dedication to a view of the constitution that exists only in their own minds is frightening.
Sadly, this distorted thinking
appears to be increasing as people don't seem to learn to distinguish between truth and rumour, which unfortunately is being made worse by social media and them increasingly living in information/cultural bubbles which ignore everything outside. Paranoia and tribalism seem alive and well and growing.
Angharad
I saw/see
A lot of McVeigh in Trump. I spent some days holding the hand of the wife of a friend of mine until she was told they had identified some remains as his. It was a closed casket funeral. I'll never forget being in a church where there was somebody always crying, twenty-four hours a day. It's something I can never forget, and I've made it my job to see to it that nobody else does either. I owe to the ones that didn't survive, both the dead and the living.
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
McVeigh knew the day-care center was there.
https://www.cnn.com/2001/US/03/29/mcveigh.book.01/index.html
McVeigh expresses no remorse and calls the children killed in the bombing "collateral damage." He was even angry that he didn't destroy the whole building. "Damn, I didn't knock the building down," he said.
Love, Andrea Lena