Saturday, May 28, 2011

Oklahoma City: Progress & the Memory of Violence

Apologies for the lack of posts yesterday. One of the best parts of this trip is meeting folks along the way and in Amarillo (where we are now and about which we'll post soon), we got lost in talking to the locals. This post is about OK City.

A Haunted Hotel & Toby Keith's Chicken Fried Everything
We cashed in two years’ worth of Hilton points to book the Skirvin in Oklahoma City for two reasons. First, it’s historic –opened in 1911 by William Balser Skirvin, it sat vacant for 19 years until Hilton renovated it in 2007. Second, it’s fabulous (see photos below). It's also rumored to be haunted by one of Skirvin's mistresses, a maid that legend says jumped out of a 10th floor window.

Skirvin Hilton by moonlight.

Lindsey could get used to this.
We toured OK City's Bricktown area - a relatively new development of restaurants, bars, and man-made canals - and ate at Toby Keith’s I Love this Bar & Grill for only one reason. One of our most prized ’66 soundtracks includes Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue as Track #3 – a song that Joe insists on blasting (and singing along to) at full volume every time he believes we've crossed into Amerrrrica. Our night in OK City was a light-hearted prelude to a somber morning at the National Memorial.

The Impact of Violence
We were in elementary school when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and killed 168 people, 19 among them children. In the years between then and now, we have grown up under the sometimes nebulous concept of terrorism – most recognizable on the morning of 9/11 as we prepared to graduate from high school and perhaps less so within the political and military decisions such tragedies spawned. But we don’t live each day under a fear that a suicide bomber will walk into our D.C. metro line or favorite coffee shop and blow us up. Our experience with terrorism is different than that of young adults living in the West Bank or in Baghdad. And to us, our leaders’ decisions – whether or not they are appropriate or effective – symbolize a refusal to adapt our way of life to chronic fear.  Perhaps our time at the Oklahoma City memorial gave us a better sense of palpable, personal loss due to such terror. 
The memorial marks the time of the bombing.
Free-standing, chain-link fences plank each side of the entrance to the Oklahoma City Memorial. These gates provided an initial barrier around the disaster site – while never intended as such, they soon became - and today remain - makeshift memorials to those lost, a place where mourners attach personal artifacts, cards, and other mementos to the wires. We saw dozens of these – some new, some faded – including a birthday card for a child that read “Today, you are 3” and a t-shirt signed by a victim's volleyball league. A bride’s bouquet, tied to the fence, was theoretically “thrown” to the girls and women killed in the blast who would never get married.


The memorial itself includes 168 empty chairs - arranged in rows to represent the building's nine floors and each bearing the name of a victim. Above the site’s entrance, a dedication reads, “May all who leave here know the impact of violence.”

The short chairs represent child victims.
On our way out of town, we stopped at Fort Reno - an old military camp established in 1874 during the
Indian Wars. From this site, the United States conducted "pacification" operations against the Cheyenne in the area and executed Grant's "Peace Policy" - which included converting tribes to Christianity, disarming them, and forcing them to become farmers. Oklahoma was the end destination for the Trail of Tears. We thought of the marketing brochure Joe picked up in our hotel - that included several paragraphs about this darker piece of the state's history. While our impression of Oklahoma was necessarily limited to those experiences we chose to have there, we left impressed by the modern, art-driven hubs of activity that are Tulsa and Oklahoma City and moved by the state's efforts to protect the memory of the violence the Nation has caused and endured on its land.

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