McVeigh’s detonation disrupted America’s holiday from history after the collapse of the long-threatening Soviet Union. With his assault on the United States government – an Oklahoma bomb blast that registered 3.0 on seismologists’ Richter scale – McVeigh taught a generation of Americans to fear again: Was this breathtaking massacre the first salvo of a widespread rebellion?
As they worked through the terrible shock, though, Americans by the millions taught themselves something else: that when a crisis arises, resolve and resilience usually defeat it.
That’s as useful a lesson during, say, a lethal pandemic, as it has been often in the past, and surely will be in the future.
The horrors of September 11, 2001, eventually would dwarf the Oklahoma City casualty count: The crime that FBI agents would code-name OKBOMB killed 168 men, women and children, injured 680 others and destroyed or damaged 324 structures – some of them 16 blocks away.
McVeigh is no longer alive. He was tried and convicted in Denver, then executed in 2001 at a federal prison in Indiana. A small number of victims’ relatives, selected from a large group who had submitted written applications, watched his peaceful death by lethal injection. Back in Oklahoma, hundreds of the victims’ relatives and survivors gathered to watch a closed-circuit telecast. News accounts noted that as McVeigh squinted without visible emotion toward the execution chamber’s observation room, one woman pressed against the glass a photo of her son, killed by McVeigh’s blast.
Oklahoma City helped teach a generation of Americans the danger of complacency – the peril of ignoring a broad range of threats to this country. It’s a lesson that global terror groups have delivered to cities on other continents: Evildoers quietly beaver away, contemplating soft targets. ‘Twill ever be thus.
But the human terrorist’s reach is limited. A more vigilant America – schooled that if you see something, say something – had to relearn the lesson after 9/11: America has to keep reminding itself that while it cannot prevent every crisis, for two-and-a-half centuries it eventually has found its bearing and recovered.
The emergencies of the last quarter-century built resolve and resilience that, if Americans again deploy them, should help overcome the current pandemic.
Not that America is a better country because its cities endured OKBOMB or 9/11 or – more broadly but less violently – the jobs-destroying Great Recession that ended in 2009.
More and different crises surely will test Americans, as the Covid-19 outbreak now demonstrates. With each one we mourn our losses, harden our protections and reassure ourselves that we will find smart ways to cope. - Tribune News Service