Tuesday, April 19, 2005

10 years ago today

Can it already have been 10 years since the bombing of the Alfred Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City?
I can say that, but to the family members of victims, it was probably a decade that never seemed to end. On April 19, 1995, America witnessed the most ghastly attack on contiguous U.S. soil in the 20th Century. The fertilizer bomb Timothy McVeigh was later convicted of planting and detonating killed 168 people, and branded an image of a high-rise with an enormous concave chunk blown out of it into our collective memory.
Six years later, in June 2001, McVeigh was executed. Three months afterward, Oklahoma City's tragedy was dwarfed in magnitude and horror by terrorist attacks that originated overseas.

Ten years after Oklahoma City, there is only one thing I am sure we have learned: people never learn.

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