Eighteen years ago today I heard a loud bang that shook the house (we lived 12 miles from downtown) but I told the dog who was looking at me quizzically, "It's just a sonic boom." Then I turned on the TV.
I can never forget the images of people, blood streaming down their faces, being helped out of that mangled mess of a building. Babies were being carried out in people's arms too, but it was too late for some. Almost all of the babies and children you saw on the news were from the YMCA day-care across the street. The babies inside the Murrah Building did not come out.
The memory that still breaks my heart...I can hardly bear to recall it...is the story of two boys who were latch-key kids. I think they were about ten and twelve, maybe younger. They went home to an empty apartment after school and waited for their single mom to come home. On that April 19, they waited through the afternoon, till dinner time, till bedtime, but she still she didn't come. They were scared, but not because they had heard of the bombing; they hadn't. They just wanted their mom because she was always there for them and this night she wasn't. And she was never there again.
But the other images I see in my mind are of nurses and doctors running toward the building, their white coats flying behind them, pushing gurneys down the street from the St. Anthony's Hospital a few blocks away. I remember hearing on TV that people were calling and asking what needs can we meet? Construction companies donated cranes, helicopters were sent from far away, one man fashioned leather booties for the feet of the dogs who were climbing over and through the rubble searching for bodies.
The lines of cars waiting to drop off any supplies they could think of stretched miles down the highway. One family came and waited for hours in line, because their little girl wanted to bring Band-Aids. Oklahoma City is a small enough city that everybody either knew someone in the bombing or knew somebody that knew someone.
Since then we've had many more terrorist acts; 9/11 and now the Boston Marathon bombing. I guess it will never go away this side of Jesus coming again, but here is what I take away from it all: Terrorists have a goal to kill and disrupt and wreak havoc and on one level they do that. But if their goal is to divide us and turn Americans against each other and to destroy us, and it is, they are stupid. They fail every time.
What they do does not destroy our country, it brings us together
