TRAVEL: How Oklahoma City Restored My Faith in America’s Goodness
Our tour of the Oklahoma bombing memorial recounts the horror of it — but our better angels too.
Once you reach a certain age, you learn there’s no profit in hate. In the ledger of life, it makes for a wanton expense, especially as our account is running out. Plus hate turns back on itself — always kills the hater and turns the hated into a powerful force for love.
This all became abundantly, overwhelmingly, emotionally evident to me when we paid a visit to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, yet another moving example of the way we honor each other as good and decent people.
The memorial occupies the site that once belonged to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Do you remember? On April 19, 1995, 168 men, women, and, yes, children perished after, at 9:01 a.m., homegrown terrorists detonated a truck bomb that disembowled the the ten-story structure.
The memorial and its museum helps us to remember all the victims. Seeing the empty “chairs” that serve as named markers for each of the 168 choked me up. Encountering their pictures in the museum next door made me weep.
ABOVE: Inside the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, a display where each and every one of the 168 bombing victims are remembered.
The memorial bears witness to something else, too. It was the way Americans came together, just as they did on 9/11, to support the families, the first responders, the police, and each other. They provided food. They gave blood. They donated more gloves than those combing the wreckage could use.
The museum steps through every aspect of that horrible day — the chaos, survivor stories, rescue and recovery, the arrest of the perpetrators, their trudge to justice. One of the most dramatic displays plays a tape recording of the regulatory hearing that was taking place just across the street. It began promptly at 9 a.m. — and, just a few minutes into the meeting, caught the bang of the explosion, ensued by the scramble for safety by those in the room..
It saddens me that it takes a catastrophe to make plain our basic human instincts for decency. Then again, the memorial forced me relive it and savor it, too.
This is what’s come home to me as the Beloved1 and I have made our “Americana Tour” through some deep red states, such as Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and now Oklahoma: We may disagree on matters such as an activist federal government, transgender rights, abortion, or any of the many other matters that we bicker about these days.
Much more unites us. Still.
Once we get to know each other, we take care of each other — even if in the every day issues of life: The neighbor who collects our mail when we’re gone, the casserole delivered at the death of a loved one, the shopping we did for one another during Covid.
If you’re ever in Oklahoma City, this is a place you must visit. It’s a dose of hope. Most of all, it made me ever so mindful, yet again, that, yes, while truly bad people may be in our midst, the vast majority of us are basically good. We have our disagreements. We have our flaws. Yet, we have no real reason to hate each other.
