Evil words, evil acts

This past weekend was the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the most destructive act of domestic terrorism in our recent history. The implosion of the Federal Building by a fertilizer bomb took the lives of 168 very ordinary people -- many of them children in daycare -- and injured 680. Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. Army soldier, was convicted of the crime and executed. He claimed this act of mass murder was in retribution for the deaths of Branch Davidian cultists in Waco, Texas.

There would have been a large public commemoration if it had not been for our present "shelter in place" condition. The site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is now a national monument, recalling this act of political violence. Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt offered these remarks about the atrocity which has lived on for many Oklahoma City residents ever since:

The Bombing was, ultimately, an act of extremist political violence made possible through dehumanization.  The journey to such an act begins with thoughts; those thoughts become words.   Like a virus, those words are heard by others and they pull out of the listener the thoughts and words that their better nature had previously rejected.  Soon, one carrier becomes many and an ecosystem is created, where ideas once considered absurd are treated with credibility. Blowing up an office building full of civilians and children requires someone to walk down that dark path.   It’s a path humanity has walked down too many times before.   It is a path of dehumanization.   And even though it ends with the most evil and horrific acts imaginable, that path is largely lined with the simplest gesture we have – words.  And if you are not hearing those echoes again in our current political discourse, I ask you to listen harder.

Evil acts like the one that occurred behind me depend on the triumph of dehumanization, the idea, first perpetuated through words, that you’re different than me.   That your motivations are not pure.   That you are my enemy, the enemy of my people, and that this struggle is so real that all tactics must be on the table.   To accept such dehumanization and to reject all the things that we share in common, the reality that we all love, we all have families, we’re all seeking virtually the same outcome, requires a remarkable amount of delusion.   But we as humans have proven ourselves time and time again capable of such delusion.   And we pay a terrible price, time and time again.

... Right now, I hear such words coming out of the mouths of some of the most prominent people in our country, and I see them echoed in daily life by those who know better.   We should know how this story ends, but let this place be a reminder.   We must have better conversations, we must reject dehumanization, we must love one another.

... To the people of Oklahoma City, I say, it is our unique obligation to carry these lessons forward.  We did not choose this obligation, it was given to us, but we must carry the load so that our people will not have died in vain.   We must speak with the authority of those who will always have a scar to which we can point, in the heart of our downtown.  We know better than most Americans what happens when empathy, love and understanding are lost.   We must be the first ones to always say, we’re all in this together.   Let’s listen to each other and let’s find common ground.

As is all too obvious, Donald Trump and his chorus of obedient GOPers play with inciting the sort of mad hatred that led to Tim McVeigh's crime. The killer virus, the crashed economy that has been sacrificed to limit the disease, the inequality that distributes the burden of the crisis so unfairly, a president desperate to pass off responsibility to someone else -- all these factors inflict pain and incite violence. Thanks to David Holt for reminding us that striking out leaves only dead children and more agony.