The Unraveling...

Image Source: Unraveling Fire II Boy - Art on Fire

Topics: Domestic Terrorism, Oklahoma Bombing, Timothy McVeigh, Xenophobia

According to this online calendar, today was Wednesday 20 years ago.

I remember the boys were with me (my wife was working) and I was off with them, making PB&J sandwiches for lunch. They were 12 and 2 then. The news of the Oklahoma City Bombing sickened me and horrified my oldest son. He wept over the thought some as young as his brother had died; I wept over both of them, and about the world that was coming. [1]

I remember the helplessness I felt when the wreckage of the Alfred P. Murrah building was broadcast on all stations across the world. We were a few months from the midterms and Newton Gingrich's "Contract With (or, some would say on) America." We were a year from the Internet using something we all take for granted now - search engines, first on home pages like AOL and Yahoo; then the very title of it becoming both a noun and verb: Bing and Google. Star Trek Voyager, Boy Meets World, Seinfeld, Friends and X-Files were our national obsessions. We were six years from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Peace Dividend we've never managed to cash in on.

The seeds of our unraveling/detachment from reality can be found here. As a nation, we've always been prone to fabricating "tall tales," but with the Internet it has made the loudmouth an expert, whether they completed a college degree, or have a wit of evident expertise in anything. The prerequisite seems to be willing to shout "fire" in crowded theaters or the public commons; babble incoherently and be misconstrued as "passionate" instead of insane. When the initial suspects were announced, every authority began looking for [initially] Arabic men; "false flag" became the excuse Du jour for everything we could not initially explain, then and now. Perhaps looking on this quick leap to accusation and judgment inspired a former US-backed Mujaheddin warrior we'd come to know infamously as Osama Bin Laden. Since they didn't care about vilification or leaps of illogical speculations, they literally had "nothing to lose."

Ominously, McVeigh was executed after waving further appeals June 11, 2001, three months to the DAY on the World Trade Center attacks of 9-11. [2]

"And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who was sitting on the horse and against his army." Rev 19:19 ESV

This has sadly been used by forces that would overthrow our democratic republic and establish a dangerous form of theocracy known as dominionism. (Note: all forms of theocratic governance are antithetical to democratic republican ideals.) Whether this is perceived as a literal or figurative event, perhaps it is a realization that peace isn't in our human natures. We have made cartoons and superheros of WWII and the "greatest generation," not having cultural memory of how hard life was here and on the war front, whitewashing what would become the Civil Rights movement as internal struggle from collective memory. "Here be dragons," and if none available, our determined imaginations will manufacture some in our need to slay them.

It was lastly, also the world of black helicopters, "jack-booted thugs" in black camouflage; "New World Order" - first in an address by President George Herbert Walker Bush, then neurosis by conspiracy theorists that would by steady osmosis - find its way into the mainstream. It was two years to the day from the Waco, Texas standoff between the ATF and the Branch Davidians and one day from Adolf Hitler's birthday (also used by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in their violent attack on Columbine High School in Colorado. In Timothy McVeigh's conspiracy-here-be-dragons literature found at the scene, a guide written sadly by a physics apostate: The Turner Diaries. William Luther Pierce may have earned a PhD in physics, but that did not inoculate him from irrational stances and daft thoughts. His lineage in the Confederacy; his alliance with the John Birch Society (founded by the patriarch of the Koch brothers), his anti-Semitic/anti-gay worldview were the seeds that filled his ink before he put pen to paper; before the Internet was a commercial entity. Hate does not require low IQ's or high tech: simple xenophobia and smoke signals will do. It is a legacy we're still inheriting, like dandelion seeds in the wind.

1. Today: 20 years later, TODAY looks back at the Oklahoma City bombing
2. History.com: Oklahoma City Bombing