As we tried to dig our way psychologically out of the blast that tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City last week, a certain consensus emerged. No matter who had perpetrated this atrocity, it represented something new, an unspeakable act somehow all the more incomprehensible because nothing like it had ever happened before.
But is it something entirely new? The answer, unfortunately, is no. On the same day it termed the explosion “an act of unprecedented terrorism,” the baiduhai compared it to the unsolved bombing on Wall Street that took the lives of 40 people in 1920 and was blamed on alien terrorists. And, The New York Times carried a grimly informative sidebar featuring not only a reproduction of its front page coverage of the Wall Street calamity but also a list of similar horrors, including the 45 people (38 of them children) killed in 1927 by a Michigan man who supposedly blew up the local school (and himself) out of fear that he would lose his farm to property taxes. Prominent on the list was the first use of dynamite in this country for terrorist purposes, Chicago’s venerable Haymarket bomb, which killed seven policemen who marched with their fellow officers on an anarchist rally at Randolph and Des Plaines Streets on May 4, 1886.
What is also not new is the way our reaction to this disaster is unfolding. On such awful occasions, we proceed through several overlapping and not always directly sequential stages of shock, denial, rage, sadness and resignation. As we learn more than we ever wanted to know about things like explosives, rescue operations, police investigations, the identification of corpses, the world view of the extreme right and the boyhood of Timothy James McVeigh, we meanwhile try to find some rallying points, which is always much harder to do in the wake of man-made catastrophes like this than natural ones. The earthquake that struck Northridge, Calif., last year cost billions of dollars more than did the riots that followed the acquittals in the Rodney King trial, but the cultural damages of the latter were far greater.
But we do find such rallying points. The aftermaths of different traumas have their own unique qualities, but they usually contain common elements. The search for the emblematic image of the event, in this case the heartbreaking photograph of the firefighter Chris Fields cradling the limp and bloodied body of Baylee Almon, murdered a day after her first birthday. Stories of unexpected heroism, especially on the part of selfless rescuers, or of the vagaries of fortune that for no particular reason seemed to make the difference between life and death . Or of heroism and luck combined, as in the arrest of McVeigh by Charles Hanger, an Oklahoma state trooper. There are always declarations that the dark cloud has a silver lining, that tragedy has brought people of all sorts together, whether to donate money and supplies, and in this case even their life’s blood, to strangers or to resolve that other social problems must be solved (National Public Radio told of a white minister in Oklahoma City being approached by a black man who spoke hopefully about racial reconciliation in the wake of the bomb). And there are the calls by outraged citizens and those in authority for greater powers to pursue and punish the wicked, followed by cautions from others that we should not permit these malefactors to force changes in our basic beliefs and conduct.
That these all fall into certain predictable patterns emphasizes rather than undermines their significance, for together they reveal how a society deals with catastrophe.
Our first reaction is to try to integrate the terrifying and the inexplicable into an existing value system, not only to help deal with what has happened, but also to reaffirm that value system. We try to fit deeply disturbing events into our explanations of how we think the world works. This helps explain the rush at first to pin the blame on foreigners in general and on U.S.-hating Muslim fundamentalist in particular. This not only “made sense” in relation to other recent terrorist activities and longstanding xenophobic strains in our culture’s history that have resurfaced in current fears about immigrants, but it also revealed how important it is for us to place the blame somehow outside what we conceive of as “our” culture, and in so doing to declare the soundness of that culture.
Hence the extra shock that such an event took place so deeply inside what reporter after reporter called “the heartland,” in a real American place like Oklahoma, the home state of Will Rogers and Woody Cuthrie, Johnny Bench and Vince Gill. And the redoubling of that shock when it appeared that the alleged agent of this monstrous act was not a swarthy foreigner who plotted his villainy in a nerve center in Tripoli, Libya, or Brooklyn,N.Y., but a crew-cut native son with good cheekbones and a firm jaw whom we ourselves had trusted and trained to defend our country.
But it is also nothing new that people have declared war on legal authority from either the left or the right and have done so in the name of patriotism. They often cite the American Revolution as the precedent for righteous violent rebellion against tyranny, and claim that their mission is to restore the country to the founding ideals that the government itself has betrayed.
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Maybe the choice of Oklahoma City is no surprise at all. Perhaps, in the logic of some members of the extreme militant right who see themselves at representing the heartland of America, the presence of a nine-story federal building in such a place was the kind of aggressive “foreign” attack against which they felt they had to defend the real America.
So is there anything new?
Sometimes there are changes in the means, if not the essential manner, by which both the best and worst among us conduct ourselves. One of the interesting sidelights of this story is of how the computer-literate, as they did after last year’s earthquake in L.A., have discussed the tragedy through the Internet, though it’s small comfort to learn also that several stops on the information superhighway furnish information on how to make such explosives. In any case, most of the differences between this appalling event and others seem to be mainly ones of degree, such as the record death toll.
Yes, there is no place in this country, let alone the ever- shrinking world, that is absolutely safe from violence, but we sadly already knew that. We also know that we can’t give in to despair or defeat, or allow our shock to alter the positive ways in which we think and act.
Rather than insist on finding something new, we need to focus on what things in the past have furnished us the courage and conviction to prevail over such deeply disturbing events.