Remembering Oklahoma City 10 years later

One of the more moving experiences I had in the past 12 months was seeing the Oklahoma City Memorial site in person during a driving vacation with my wife and youngest daughter. I thought of what I had seen during today’s 10th anniversary memorial service on television.
For anyone within driving distance of Oklahoma City, it is a trip well worth taking. The memorial itself is unique among American sites and is a tribute to the community, the state of Oklahoma and the U.S. Park Service, charged with its oversight. While we were unable to tour the actual museum inside the surviving structure, that was not as important as walking the grounds, looking into the reflecting pool, standing midway between the two arch-like structures with “9:01” and “9:03” inscribed on either side, seeing the 168 small chairs on the south side of the grounds (one for each of the victims inside the Murrah Federal Building that day) and the tree that survived at the blast site.
It was important that I was there with my daughter, Kelsey, a typical teenager in that she lives her life blessedly unaware of most world and national activities that don’t involve school, boys and … more boys. It was a rare opportunity for a father to impress and impart some wisdom about what happened in 1995 and why she needed to see it and learn from it.
She was told that there were, and are, people who are capable of doing this without funny Arabic-sounding last names. These things can be done by people who look like her, whom she might associate herself with and that she might have friends who had family in Oklahoma City that were affected by the tragedy.
The man who did this was a former soldier, allegedly sworn to defend the nation, not try to kill its own citizens, many of whom were too young to barely articulate what it meant to be an American, let alone to be alive.
We spent about an hour on the grounds, took dozens and dozens of photos on what was a gray, overcast summer Monday morning. It was quiet, with few visitors joining us. I thought at the time that such solitude was probably appropriate; one needed to be alone with his or her thoughts.
I know I did the right thing last year to take Kelsey to see this. She might not appreciate it today, or even understand it completely. I’m not sure anyone will fully understand what happened, but it DID happen. Before 9/11, there was Oklahoma City and in many, many ways, it was a more dangerous signal of what could happen to us … by us.