Truth and Remembrance

I could not let this day go past without noting it, since today marks the tenth anniversary since the Oklahoma City bombing. Given contemporary news cycles, this annivesary gets a fair amount of press, most of it pretty disappointing, maudlin drivel. Yes, it's terrible what these people endured, but the focus is so relentlessly turned on the personal stories that what gets excluded from these reports is any sort of analysis about the white supremacist ideology that spawned Timothy McVeigh. Indeed, the exclusive focus on the personal stories in reporting on this event that it produces a dozen or so in the mix like this one, about Bill McVeigh, father of Timothy who is apparently completely without insight, but with plenty of pain, ten years after his son's crime.

What most of the news analysis fails to do is offer any sense of how McVeigh's crime might be connected to white supremacy or larger systems of inequality, and almost every report refers to what motivated him as "extreme anti-government views." Well, yeah sure, that's true...but it's incomplete and so only offers part of the truth. And, there are still lots of unanswered questions about that day in Oklahoma City that no one in power has any interest in investigating.

Remembering the victims, and the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing is important, but just as important is understanding the ideology that motivated McVeigh, and finding out the truth about who his accomplices were that day.