Reflections from our president and Oklahoma native Sarah Reidy-Jones:
Today offers so much excitement with the 250th anniversary of the “shot heard round the world” and the kickoff of our semiquincentennial celebration of America’s independence.
And yet, the world stops as I remember the tragedy in Oklahoma City when America’s innocence was ripped away with a singular blast. April 19, 1995 is a date we should never forget in our American heritage.
Thirty years ago, I watched it unfold during my freshman history class at Sapulpa High School. We felt the boom from the blast of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 90 miles away. We tried to make sense of why anyone could have such hate in their hearts to kill 168 innocent lives. Our family happened to fly to Washington D.C. the next day – my first experience flying in a post-terrorism world. Sadly this experience became a “new normal” again first-hand on September 11 as a 21 year-old college student living in Arlington, VA. I look at my 9 year old and realize he has never experienced a world with the same freedoms I had as a child.
As an Oklahoma native, I’ll never forget the comforting leadership of then-Governor and First Lady Keating or the awful first-hand stories told to me from search and recovery teams and the survivors that managed to escape. This is a story about 168 normal people just reporting to work, planning on running an errand in a busy federal building or (most heart-wrenching) just playing with other small children at their daycare. Normal people that never had a normal life again.
I’ve been to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum and sobbed while walking through the museum, sitting at the survivor tree and of course seeing 168 empty chairs by the reflecting pool. Especially when two of those chairs represent two lives that you once knew, so senselessly ended, when all they were doing was stopping by their local Social Security office for a routine appointment. Two lives that would never see their four children or nine grandchildren again. You walk into the memorial with very pronounced timestamp gates. It really sums up all of our lives – 9:01AM represents the innocence before the attacks, 9:02AM is the formal museum entrance and start of the attack, and 9:03AM begins recovery and healing.
Let us all never forget. And I especially will never forget Charles and Jean Hurlburt.
We are all #OklahomaStrong. #WeRemember
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