During the summer of 2003, I accompanied the Edmond North High School marching band on a trip to the Oklahoma City National Memorial on the site of the Murrah building. North's marching band was doing a halftime show that fall that used the Memorial as a theme.
We toured the entire site, and let me tell you... if you don't shed tears while you're watching the archival news coverage, seeing the items that were salvaged from the remains of the building, or think about those 19 children who died, then you aren't human or don't have any emotions. Because I tried, and failed, to keep it together in front of the five students I was accompanying through the exhibits: my 17 year old son, two of his friends, and two girls I didn't know.
I still can't look at that picture of firefighter Chris Fields holding the limp body of Baylee Almon (She later died. She'd celebrated her first birthday just the day before) without tearing up. Hell, I can't even see the computer screen well enough to type this sentence... wait a sec--
Okay, I've got it together now.
I didn't live in Oklahoma in 1995, and I watched the coverage of the bombing on TV from where I was living in Chesapeake, Virginia. It still boggles my mind that two men with such hatred towards the government could blow up a building on a Tuesday morning without a care about the people inside. Men, women, chilren in the day care center... Man's cruelty to man simply astounds me. War is one thing, but this was no war as far as I'm concerned. I don't know what McVeigh and Nichols were thinking...maybe to them, it was war.
To me, it was and still is a national tragedy.
So there. Wanna argue with me, I can argue all day long.
I hope Timothy McVeigh is rotting in hell and Terry Nichols dies a slow painful death.
