Yesterday being the 11th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I suppose I should just be grateful that, this year at least, we’re not cursed with an Ann Coulter profile in Time.
Still, every year since 2002, this sad anniversary reminds me of a question I still haven’t heard answered:
Why wasn’t April 19, 1995 the “day that changed everything”?
Where were you on that April morning?
I was at work in Marietta, Georgia, and the news came through pretty garbled. A 70 story building had been leveled, something blew up, it wasn’t clear for a while.
Early reports suggested it was middle-eastern/swarthy foreign types: the fact it was a white guy, an Army veteran, somehow makes it less outrageous. Why is it less alarming that a native-born American would blow up a government building in the middle of the country than that a known terrorist, whose agenda is well-known, should attack largely symbolic targets on the east coast? I don’t mean to trivialize the WTC attacks or the attack on the Pentagon but blowing up a building on OKC suggests a different mindset. And I don’t know that this administration would be prepared for another OKC-type incident. I suspect if it did happen, swarthy middle-eastern types would be the Usual Suspects, even if someone like Tim McVeigh was seen.