Two entrances opposite each other on the east and west ends of the city block bounded by Harvey and Robinson avenues.  Stretching between them, in the space that was formerly N. W. Fifth Street, is the shallow reflecting pool that separates the memorial to the victims of the explosion from the memorial to the rescuers.  On Robinson Avenue, on either side of the entrance, is a chain link fence on which mementos to the victims have been hung—some very recent, some dating back to 1995.  As these remembrances accumulate, they are periodically transferred to the Memorial Center Museum archives.  

The impact of the memorial is reinforced by the immense thoughtfulness—some of it obvious, some subtle—that has gone into the construction.  I will try to convey this thoughtfulness in my account.

The entrances are two monumental gates, made of amber stone, rising 50 feet into the air.  On their inner surface, facing the pool, are carved 9:01 on one side, 9:03 on the other.  Thus, they frame the moment of the explosion, 9:02 a.m.:  the moment before, when all was normal, no inkling of disaster, and the moment after, when all was trauma.

Three primary groups of people are remembered in the Memorial:  victims, survivors, and rescuers.  The grassy Field of Chairs, immediately to the south of the reflecting pool, which covers the exact ground space of the Murrah building, is a gentle slope in which there is a chair for each victim, arranged in nine rows, one row for each floor of the building.  At night, the base of each chair is illuminated—we missed that perspective on the memorial.  Each chair is in the same shape, and each has a distinctive design on its seat, with the name of the victim represented.  The children’s chairs are the same, but smaller.  Each person’s chair is in the row that corresponds to the floor on which the person was located at the time of the explosion.  Five chairs at the edge of the field represent the victims who were outside the building.  On a section of wall that survived the blast, at the north end of the Field of Chairs, are etched the names of the survivors.

The area to the south of the pool is the Rescuers Orchard.  This space is a steeper hill, at the top of which is the Survivor Tree, an American elm that, though damaged, survived the explosion.  The grove of fruit- and flower-bearing trees seems to be rushing up the hill toward the Survivor’s Tree, imaging the rush of the rescuers to the scene after the blast.

The motion upwards in both of these fields brought to mind the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts weary soldiers trudging up a hill.  A note hanging on the fence in Oklahoma City says, “If memories were stairs, we would climb to heaven to be with you.”  

The children are prominent in this memorial, since there was a day- care center in the Murrah building.  The plaza in front of the Memorial Center Museum, paved with large slabs of slate, is designated “the Children’s Area.”  Children are encouraged to contribute their own words and drawings on the slate, using the large pieces of colored chalk provided at this site.  A wall of tiles adjoins this area.  The tiles are a portion of those that school children contributed, each one with a hand-painted design or saying, with the name of the artist and the school.  Many more of these tiles are located in the Museum.  Several of the schools we noted were from small towns in Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.  Later that day we drove through the area of those towns, and I was struck by how ordinary and nondescript they were, rising out of the Great Plains that mark so much of the American landscape west of the Mississippi.  This reinforced for me the sense that the Oklahoma City Memorial is so intensely the Memorial for, by, and of the Common People.  The unique and quiet beauty of the Great Plains on which they lived matches the beauty of the Memorial to these People.  Perhaps in contrast to the New York World Trade Center scene, any trace of elitism or glitziness is utterly absent from this memorial.  The Murrah Building was a federal facility, but it was not a symbol for the world, it was not the nerve center of America or of Capitalism, or of the Military Establishment.  Nor is Oklahoma City a world media center.  These were ordinary Americans, many of them working parents who placed their children in the child-care center that was provided by their employer.  The weeping Jesus seemed to echo Abraham Lincoln’s words, “God must love the common people, because he made so many of them.”

We thought also of the Nazi concentration camps we have visited in Germany—the mass killing of so many common people who were utterly undeserving of the violence that was turned against them.

“We come here to remember”—these words are the stated theme of the Memorial.  They also express precisely what we came away with, an overpowering awareness that remembering is our appropriate obligation and contribution, as well as a forceful reminder that it is the people we are to remember and a clear perception of who these people are.  

Since we did not go to the Museum, I do not know whether Timothy McVeigh and the other perpetrators of the Oklahoma City terrorism receive any attention at the Memorial.  However, they and their memory are totally absent from the Memorial itself.  This is a testimony to persons who were victims, survivors, and rescuers.  The extraordinary care with which remembering is embodied in this memorial is a monument in itself, to the spirit of those who are remembered and of those who do the remembering.  For me, the Memorial is an expression of the highest possibilities of the human spirit, particularly when it is devoted to remembering people and the ideals of those people, in ways appropriate to the occasion of the 1995 attack.

I thought of McVeigh several times.  I did not feel hatred or pity for him, but rather anger and sadness and a sense of the abiding absurdity of his obsession and his action.  Today, more than six years afterwards, only a fool would believe that his action makes a statement about any “ideals” that he held, about the oppression of government, or about the Branch Davidian or Ruby Ridge events that he frequently invoked.  He stands in memory as an insane malignancy, an antibody in the body politic gone berserk.  The overwhelming testimony of the Memorial, as I have already said, is to the spirit of those who were victims, survivors, and rescuers, and also to the spirit of those who remember—those who constructed the Memorial and those of us who share in its spirit.

I’m not certain that one should even think of the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. when one goes to Oklahoma City, since it calls for our participation in its spirit, on its own intrinsic terms—but such thoughts are inevitable.  For one thing, the official brochure of the Memorial refers to the 1995 event as “the largest terrorist attack in U. S. history.”  That will have to be revised.  Moreover, the Oklahoma City Memorial expresses an eerie prescience that could include 11 September:  The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (which we did not visit) sponsors research on first care responses to terrorism and also on “technologies intended to thwart use of biological and chemical weapons.”  (See the website at <www.mipt.org>.)

In quantitative terms, there is little comparison between Ground Zero and Oklahoma City.  However, we also think of the issues involved, the quality of life, and the challenge that remembering poses to the human spirit of those of us who remain.  From this perspective, Oklahoma City and 11 September are two facets of the same reality, the same insanity on the part of the perpetrators, the same emptiness caused by the loss of life, and the same challenge for the rest of us, to remember.

Did we declare war on 19 April 1995?  No, but every known domestic terrorist or would-be terrorist was surely under surveillance by authorities, and the appropriate investigations did finally locate the leader of the attack, and he has been executed.  Did we need to declare war then?  Do we need to after 11 September?  Those questions will continue to be asked, but the actions taken against suspected terrorists today are perhaps not in principle different from those we took in 1995.  The response to New York-Washington is different, of course, because the nature and scope of the attack was different.

1995 in Oklahoma City was a homegrown American event, and the Memorial reflects that.  There is an exotic quality to the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, no doubt highlighted by the media tilt toward the unusual.  Oklahoma City reveals facets of the American character that are painful to look at.  The socio-religious background and motivation of Timothy McVeigh and his sympathizers are all too American for the media to focus upon.  Fundamentalist Christianity, filtered through a distinctly American version of social class discrimination, does not possess the strange attraction of fundamentalist Middle Eastern Islam.  We can look in the face of McVeigh and truly say, “We have seen the enemy face-to-face, and it is us.”  Regardless of the increasing cultural and religious pluralism in the United States, a face-to-face encounter with Mohammed Atta cannot elicit the same reaction.  

Perhaps April 1995 and September 2001 ought to be held together in our thoughts.  The more recent attacks establish the common bond between the indigenous terrorist drives within the American psyche and the same drives in every other culture.  The demonic possibilities of our own socio-religious substrate are shown to be of a piece with identical possibilities in other cultures and in their religious substrates.  We rage against foreign political and religious leaders who fulminate against America, but we have given no attention to the omnipresent mantra that so many American politicians and clergy recite ad nauseam exalting “local control” against “big government” and “taxes,” often railing against “Washington, D.C.”—in ways that can encourage the McVeigh’s and the militia spirit precisely as the Middle Eastern discontents were egged on by the rhetoric of their politicians and clergy.  When we insist that America be white, Christian, and exclusively English speaking, we are adding fuel to the fire.

President Bush deserves credit for the grace with which he abandoned this mantra, which was so prominent in the Republican campaign of 2000.  The fact that we are now acknowledging publicly that being Jewish, Muslim, Black, Latino, and Asian is fully as American as being white and Christian may indeed be the best long-term safeguard against the terrorism of Timothy McVeigh.  For many of us it is the painful admission that the “L” word is not all bad and the “C” word is not all good.  

The Oklahoma City-World Trade Center juxtaposition reminds us that our problem is not one of our own culture under attack by another culture, but rather it is a human problem we face; the “alien” culture we oppose is really a stream within our own culture, as well as a foreign one.  And just as Timothy McVeigh and Mohammed Atta are soul brothers joined by like-minded adherents around the world, those of us who disown that culture are also an international community that is represented in every culture in the world.  This fact will be highlighted if the current anthrax attacks do turn out to be domestic in origin, as many observers now believe.

I found myself wondering what I would find at Ground Zero five or ten years from now.  Will there be a memorial to the people, or to the institutions that were located there?  (The institution that was attacked by McVeigh is scarcely referred to at Oklahoma City.)  Even more, I ask myself, will the absurdity of the perpetrators be so clearly communicated?  Will it be so forcefully expressed, albeit indirectly, as in Oklahoma City, that in retrospect we see no connection between the act of killing innocent people and the perpetrators’ ideological disagreement with and hatred of the policies of a government or other institution.  The irony of historical awareness underscores that the innocent did indeed not die in vain.  The death of the perpetrators, on the other hand, is so senseless that it seems to be nothing else but a vain and futile event.  Or will the visitor to Ground Zero in 2007 come away with a quite different awareness?  The challenge to those who are responsible for directing our efforts to memorialize 11 September, and also to all of us, resides in Oklahoma City:  In our remembering to rise to the heights of creativity and thoughtfulness that are commensurate with the greatness of the human spirit.