We Can’t Forget
On an ordinary Wednesday in the spring of 1995, I hustled out the side doors of the gym at Norman High School during my morning planning period to grab a fast-food biscuit from the joint across the street. I drove because it was faster than walking and I had to hurry back for my next class, but I vividly remember thinking, I should have enjoyed the air. Oklahoma weather can be cantankerous, especially in the spring, but April 19th was in the early stages of a picture-perfect day.
My car radio was on a local station as I waited in line at the drive-through when the DJ broke into the 80’s rock to say something strange had just occurred. They had felt what seemed to be an explosion. While they weren’t sure exactly what had happened or where it had occurred, he felt the jolt in his chair on the 4th floor of the building on the city’s northwest side. I turned the radio dial to a country station and the DJs there were saying the same things from a different building on the other side of town. Oddly enough, vaguely, I had thought I’d felt a tremor myself just minutes before. It felt like distant thunder sounds, which seemed strange on such a sunny day.
The news was the same on every station. You could feel the confusion as those responsible for delivering the facts were scrambling to get information. There was concern and conjecture. If it was an explosion, it must have been electrical in nature, or maybe the result of a collision of vehicles that set off a violent ignition. Maybe a natural gas line leak? They thought all kinds of things.
But no one thought, “A Bomb.”
Before April 19, 1995, bombs, to me, were things armies used in wars. I think we rehearsed for a bomb threat or two in elementary school, but as kids we had no concept of what that meant. Bombs were like a movie prop, a thing that James Bond miraculously lived through. Something somewhat mysterious that happened somewhere far away.
But that was 27 years ago. Before Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck on Harvey and 5th and blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building with about 600 employees inside and a day care on the bottom floor.
This past weekend thousands gathered in downtown Oklahoma City to remember and to run. We ran in reverence for the deceased. We ran in honor of the survivors. We ran in defiance to evil. We ran to remind ourselves that we can do things that, perhaps, we didn’t know we could. And we ran because it felt like a way of doing something—anything—that might prevent this from happening again.
From 1995 forward, any time I hear “Boom!” my first thought is always “a bomb.” It’s not a car backfiring, or a transformer blowing or an out of nowhere clap of thunder. My frame of reference has a terror point that it never used to have. For the first half of my life, horrific tragedies were natural disasters and accidents--like tornadoes or car wrecks. Nobody shot up a school—ever. Nobody flew an airplane into a building. People didn’t die en masse at the hands of madmen in places they regularly frequented like the mall, the grocery store, and church.
The headlines never read “Terrorist Attack.” That’s just how it was “back then”, in the days before April 19th, 1995.
As we pounded the streets Sunday morning, I couldn’t help but think back to the day that rocked our world. My oldest child was three when Oklahoma’s unthinkable happened. I rushed home from work to hug him and had trouble letting go. We all sat stunned for days staring at our TVs around the clock while combing through names of the missing and the dead. Everybody knew somebody who was there. And most of us knew someone that nobody could find. The images were horrific--raw terror and exquisite bravery. The culmination of human extremes leapt out of the screen and into our homes. I was transfixed by what I watched people do. And never imagined it would be a scene I’d someday see re-played from coast to coast.
In my children’s lifetimes so far: the Murrah building exploded, kids were massacred at Columbine, planes flew into buildings and crashed in fields on 9/11, children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook, and the list goes on….which is a gospel truth that I can scarcely fathom. Mass casualties are so commonplace it gets hard to remember them all.
In the moments, hours, days, weeks, and months that followed what was, at that time, the most egregious act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil, Oklahoma set the bar for how to do whatever it is you have to do next after something comes from nowhere and turns you inside out. Our state’s courageous, compassionate response at the scene and its commitment to remembering the victims and the heroes set the standard for the world. And our relentless refusal to forget is what keeps hope alive. Hope… that our children’s children might hear “Boom!” and think of thunder. That they might get to grow up in a world where they feel safe.
On the north side of the Oklahoma Memorial stands the Survivor Tree, the iconic elm that simply refused to go away. It majestically presides over the reflecting pool and the symbolic chairs as if keeping them under its watchful eye is its most important job. Saplings of it have been planted all over this state and across the country, rooting strength into all sorts of random soils. It is our maybe.
Maybe the world can get better.
Less likely things have happened. It stands as living proof.
Sherri Coale
P.S. Local radio stations played this song daily in the spring of 1995. I never hear it that I don't think of that ominous day.