Gary and my sister Jeanne and I spent a meaningful day in Oklahoma City one afternoon. It was one of those days where, even though you might be with other people, you spend a lot of time reflecting by yourself and thinking big thoughts.
We first toured the Fine Arts Museum and were ‘blown’ away by the Chihuly Glass Exhibit. This man has been making art since the 1970’s. His installations are enormous, fragile, colorful, and just beyond imagination. This museum has his permanent collection, but his pieces have been installed all over the world. I loved seeing all the vivid colors and odd shapes and marveled at the creative displays of this fragile medium.
The second place we visited that afternoon was The Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. Like most people, I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news that fateful morning of April 19, 1995. A ‘homegrown’ terrorist had used fertilizer and his truck which he parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to make a statement against the government.
Dropping off my son at his babysitter’s house, Kasey and I comforted each other as we discussed our disbelief and bewilderment that someone from the USA would deliberately set off a bomb at the Federal building and kill 168 innocent people, 19 of whom were small children attending the daycare center. We both hugged our babies a little extra that day.
It was a somber and beautiful memorial. There were strategically placed metal and glass chairs along the grassy hillside, set up in rows signifying which floor of the building the victims were on at the time of the bombing. The 19 tinier chairs were the ones that really pulled at the heart.
Another beautiful and poetic part of the memorial were the two black marble towers that stood on either end of a shallow reflecting pool. One was etched with the time 9:01, the other 9:03, reflecting the times immediately before and after the bomb exploded at 9:02 am.
The symbolism of the times – the innocence and fragility of life before the bombing, and across the pool of water (which is symbolic of life itself) the time of life after the bombing, shattered and forever changed.
As you walk around the memorial or sit on a bench and reflect, a sudden sadness and pointlessness washes over you. Then perhaps, anger and frustration pops into your head and heart, as you contemplate the fact that we haven’t learned much in the past 30 years. Bad people are still out there committing bad acts on innocent people.
I’ve shown my former students many of our country’s iconic memorials scattered across our land, discussed the materials used, the symbolism and the lasting impact they possess. We discussed the reasons behind the memorials, the random acts of terror or the symbolic gesture and purposes of these structures. I tried not to dwell too much on the immense loss of life. But sitting there on that bench that afternoon, I did.
Will there ever be a time when we don’t need to design and build a new memorial? Probably not, but we can still think those big thoughts, and hope.