Necessary Roughness

I have been to the site of the former Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City twice, before and after the completion of the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

The Memorial that stands today is beautiful, from the chairs to the reflecting pool, the arches to the rebuilt church, to the tree that stands in defiance of a couple of men and a Ryder truck. Newsok.com pays a good multimedia tribute.

What I remember, though, I can’t find in today’s media coverage. If an OKC reader sees this perhaps they can comment, but the Quicktime Virtual Tour doesn’t show the graffiti on the south wall of the Journal Record building, across from the “Survivor Tree” that demanded justice for the perpetrators:

“We search for the truth
We seek justice
The courts require it
The victims cry for it
And GOD demands it.”
Beside the words are spray painted, “(Rescue) Team 5, 4-19-95.”

Did it get scrubbed off? Was it Photoshopped out of the presentation? Are we only supposed to know about the racist and Nazi graffiti that was in other places?

When I saw the site the first time (I believe it was 1997), before the memorial was completed in 2000, a fence surrounded the foundation of the Murrah building, still holding the dangerous potential of dropping concrete. People had posted all sorts of memorabilia of those who were lost: a beauty pageant ribbon, a softball team cap, class photos, a picture of a mother and holding her daughter, but what killed me was the rank badges from the uniform of a Cub Scout whose den was visiting that day. The nearby church was undergoing repairs; the windows had been blown out of the Journal Record building to the north. Such things boil off notions of moral relativism and social Darwinism.

The second time I visited, the place seemed sanitary. There’s even a designated area for “First Amendment” protests. The 168 chairs and the reflecting pool are nice, but the German architecture just doesn’t compare to the photos of a fireman rescuing a charred child (a nursery was just a floor or two above the point of detonation), or the viewing of a collapsed foundation, or the graffiti that cries for justice. I know something had to be done; all that damage was just unsafe. What’s there now, or what I saw there the second time, just didn’t visually or viscerally convey that what happened in downtown Oklahoma City was wrong. I got the sense that something was missing, but that was it.

I do recommend going and checking it out, especially if you’re visiting the Bricktown area (fine ballpark and restaurants down there by the way). Maybe you can tell me whether the good graffiti was taken out with the bad or if you also feel that some of the message was lost in the translation to the Memorial.