Write for God

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month and two events in the past 15 years have certainly borne him out. On April 19, 1993, the federal government ended the standoff at Waco with a fiery blaze that killed church members of all ages and races. Two years later, a blast in Oklahoma City killed 168 people of all ages and races who had business in the city’s federal building. When the so-called perpetrators of the bombing were brought to trial, the government and the defense tied one event to the other as motive and result.If the bombing in Oklahoma City was payback for the forced end to the 51-day holdout at the Branch Davidians’ property, who ultimately lost? The federal government didn’t, even though agents tortured the Branch Davidians with a constant barrage of noises that included animals being slaughtered and cut off their food and water supplies to force them out.

Though investigations by Congress and independent reports found discrepancies, no one in the FBI or ATF was brought to trial for firing flash-bang grenades or punching holes in doors with military-issue tanks on civilian soil.  The front door at the Branch Davidians’ property—invariably called a “compound” in the message-controlled media—was the subject of much controversy. David Koresh and his followers claimed that the door showed evidence of incoming bullets by federal agents who swore fire had come from inside the building; the door was removed and has never been seen again. Like President John F. Kennedy’s brain, it has disappeared in the black hole of potentially embarrassing objects that powerful forces would never want analyzed.

Some of the Branch Davidians were charged with gun-related crimes after the siege. Families were wiped out and federal agents posed atop Bradley vehicles brought home from Gulf War I to celebrate their victory. Two years passed after the blaze that ended the impasse at Waco and then another disaster killed about the same number of little children in a day care in Oklahoma City. The sentinel image of the Murrah building bombing was the photo of Baylee Almon, the dying toddler cradled by a firefighter. For me, the mirror image of Waco was a forensic shot of another little girl who happened to be David Koresh’s daughter. The grotesquely contorted body of Star Howell—burned and bent like a backward C from the effects of the CS gas pumped into the Branch Davidians’ building—didn’t get on the cover of TIME and Newsweek and only a minority of Americans saw it. If they had, some would have blamed her painful death on the sins of her father.

The dead and mangled children at the Murrah’s day-care center were losers, simply because of where they sat on the morning of April 19, 1995. The children who survived will have major health issues for the rest of their lives. The horror of the children’s deaths in Waco was swept aside by Bill Clinton’s administration, whose order to end the siege came through Attorney General Janet Reno. Good liberals will gloss over the deaths at Waco as gun nuts gone crazy who deserved what they got. They have never seen the blood on Clinton and Reno’s hands.

Oklahoma City was a different matter. Bill Clinton’s first response was to seek the death penalty for the perpetrators, then he blamed the bombing on his political enemies on right-wing talk radio. The Southern Poverty Law Center made millions scaring Americans into thinking that gun owners equaled white supremacist terrorists. Clinton pointed to the events in Oklahoma City as the reason he had the momentum to win a second term. He also pushed through anti-terrorist legislation that no one was interested in until the dead children began to be pulled out the Murrah building’s wreckage. The events at Waco and Oklahoma City were certainly gains for Bill Clinton.

Oklahoma City was a tragedy that wouldn’t be overshadowed in carnage until 9/11 six years later, but America didn’t see any dead babies in the World Trade Center. The bombing will always be seared into our consciousness as a senseless bloodbath symbolized by a tiny, broken body in a firefighter’s arms. The image stirred revenge when it was easier to prosecute Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the crime and forget about the “others unknown” mentioned in their indictments. As long as someone was on trial, it didn’t matter if there were others responsible who were free or that two guys and a truck full of fertilizer couldn’t have created the damage at the Murrah building.

I’ve read the transcripts of the McVeigh and Nichols trials and I am amazed at how weak the prosecutors’ arguments were, but no one cared. There were holes large enough to park a Ryder truck in; a detailed defense document that raised questions about the evidence against McVeigh were not allowed to be presented, thanks to the judge presiding over the case. Jurors didn’t need to be confused by the evidence presented in the document, ruled Judge Richard Matsch. Someone had to pay at the first high-profile trial after O.J. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict. Nichols managed life in prison and McVeigh was sentenced to death, which was carried out in record time six years after the crime and four years after the trial.

There were dead in Waco, dead in Oklahoma City and dead in the federal penitentiary where McVeigh was executed by lethal injection three months to the date before 9/11. The culture of violence demands its sacrifices on a public altar. More dead followed at the World Trade Center and many times its toll dies in Iraq every year that the obscenity of “mission accomplished” disintegrates into “morass accomplished.” It’s no accident that the Texas Governor who presided over more judicial deaths than any other became the American President whose bloody neocon agenda slaughters civilians without impunity.

Are we better off as a nation because the FBI and ATF killed civilians at Waco or because the Bush-Cheney coven kills civilians and military personnel in Iraq? Our nation’s pride in being the beacon of liberty and human rights is forever tarnished. Hundreds of billions of our dollars will fund the blood spilled in Iraq. Little victims there will grow into angry terrorists who will multiply many times over to create more death in the years to come. For what?

I clearly remember the morning that Timothy McVeigh was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute. As I was settling into my desk at work, two co-workers were gleefully discussing with each passing minute after 8 a.m. on the morning of June 11, 2001 how certain chemicals would be ending his life. They laughed and cheered as the end got closer in much the same way that others might count down the end of the old year on December 31. Their bloodlust curdled my stomach and I found my coffee, breakfast and lunch that day ruined. I could never look at the two the same way again after that glimpse into their perverse joy at someone’s impending death. I could find no cause for celebration in the death of one of God’s children, no matter his sins. That was an issue for McVeigh, the Roman Catholic priest who administered Last Rites and absolution and God. None of us can have the moral authority to override God’s power to judge.

Pope John Paul II railed against our modern culture of death. Through Waco and Oklahoma City over the past 15 years, we’ve seen death in April. Long after T.S. Eliot termed the month the cruelest, it remains the bloodiest.