What do you remember about OK bombing?

Question

My homework is to write a one or two double spaced pages on a OK bombing. Could you help? I need to know your personal experience and what you thought at that time.

Thanx.

Thank you much.

Answer 1

I was at work the day it happened, and people kept coming in and telling us about it, but we didn't really have any solid news, and we didn't really know how bad it was because we didn't have a TV or a radio in the building.

When I got home at about 9:15 in the evening, it was on TV, and my husband was sitting watching. I sat there and looked at the pictures of a huge building with the whole front gone, and I listened as they explained about where the daycare center was in the building, and where the different offices were located, and I just felt sick to my stomach. I am Arab American, and I remember saying to my husband, "Oh, please tell me it wasn't Arab terrorists, please say it wasn't," but he didn't know. No one knew at the time. I was already so sick of the rude comments I heard all the time about Arabs, and so tired of Arabs and Muslims being misunderstood, and I couldn't stand the thought of them doing something to make the US mad again. I felt so sad and torn. It hurts when the two cultures you are a part of are at war with one another.

We sat and watched it, and then my husband went to bed. I stayed up late, just watching the same stuff over and over, because there wasn't much information.

I was off work for the next couple of days, so I followed the developments pretty closely. When I found out it was an American who had done it, I was both relieved and doubly sad. The only thing I could think of that was worse than a foreign terrorist doing that was an American doing it.

It was just a very sad time. I remember talking to a lot of people, and I remember hearing on the news that it was the deadliest attack on American soil since the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor that took us into WWII. I remember people crying at the number of casualties. Sadly, I also remember hearing a lot of people saying, "We'll never see a terrorist attack this bad again in our lifetimes." I wish that were true, but 9/11 proved those people wrong.

I remember feeling helpless, because there were so many people going to help, but I live in the Western US, and I couldn't just leave my job and go there to help. I would have been willing to go and pass out sandwiches and waterbottles, or answer phones, or do anything to help make it better, but I couldn't go, and I felt so horrible about that.

For days, all I could do was sit and watch the news, and try to do things around the house, like laundry and dishes. But mostly I cried. I cried a lot.

Answer 2

The first thing that came to my mind was that there had been a foreign terrorist attack on middle American. As the news came out that an American had been caught as the culprit, I started wondering what shape this nation was in.

I visited the Murrow Building site about 6 months after the attack and saw the chain link fence around the area with all the stuffed animals and flowers on the fence and then realized that while there are a few malcontents in the nation (and always will be), the country is in pretty good shape.

This feeling was confirmed the first time i saw the chairs in the memorial park and the pool out front (and i am from the east coast). As tragic as this may have been, it did much for me to restore by faith in the United States of America.