Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Everyone I know, including me, bursts into tears at all kinds of things. My memory is starting to come back, and I can concentrate some on work.
I am not alone in not being able to remember basic things that happened before April 19. The whole city is in a depression. I knew slightly only one person who died, but like everyone else here, I'm only a step or two away from a lot more.
I was in Tulsa on Wednesday, and it seemed odd not to have National Guard troops around. I go by the church that is the Red Cross Center several times a day, and do my singing there. The medical examiner's office is in the next block from my office, so I have to go by the NG keeping out the gorier of the reporters. It's amazing what lengths some people will go to to get pictures of body bags.
We'll get over it eventually, I guess.
\ Those words were written 11 days after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Now, a month after it, Oklahoma City presumably is a few days closer to the eventuality of getting over it.
In the country as a whole, the initial shock has given way to assigning blame. For some, that means blaming "conservatives" for aping the more shocking of radio's right-wing shock-talk jocks. For others, that means blaming "liberals" for electing a president so bad that you have to expect an outraged citizenry. Numerous other arguments and permutations of arguments also have been advanced.
In a way, it's all absurd. Criminal culpability belongs to those who perpetrated or conspired to perpetrate the deed, and there's much merit in adhering to the criminal law's relatively narrow definition of blame. At some level, individuals must be held responsible for their own actions. Rapists, not pornography, cause rape; bombers, not inanely spiteful radio talk, cause bombings.
Yet in a way, the quest to place blame is simply a search for solutions. And that's not so absurd. Mass murder is horrible, but it isn't a "disaster" in the sense of a natural catastrophe beyond human control. It is, rather, a catastrophic rupture of the glue that binds humans together in a society.
That such a rupture would send an entire city into a depressed condition does not startle. But it does serve as a reminder of something that seems to get ignored a lot these days: the fact that people exist in society, and possess not only rights as individuals but also duties and responsibilities to the larger community.
Healthy individuals are produced by healthy societies, and in a healthy society the individual cannot be everything. Even in a democracy where freedom of individual conscience is properly accorded great respect, it is understood - or used to be, anyway - that, say, an individual's conscientious objection to society's decision to go to war could entail unpleasant but legitimate consequences, such as a jail term or unarmed military service.
In America nowadays, the notion of individual rights seems to have expanded to the point of triviality, and the notion of community accordingly diminished.
This is not confined to any particular spot on the spectrum of political ideology. A couple of examples among many:
On the political right, the argument is increasingly popular that individual landowners have an inherent right to do anything they want with their property, regardless of its impact on others' welfare or on the general good, and should be compensated monetarily if such power is circumscribed in virtually any way at all.
On the political left, meanwhile, the notion has become entreched that individual Americans possess not only traditionally guaranteed rights but also a hierarchy of new rights calibrated according to the individual's degree of victimhood by reason of parentage, gender or sexual persuasion.
And for Americans all over the spectrum, government programs for improving society in general - parks, schools, scientific research - are typically met with greater skepticism, and greater willingness to cut, than programs for dispensing public funds to beneficiaries who are individually entitled, given a right, to the money.
This is mainstream stuff, of course, and a long way from blowing up 167 people to make a point. But the tendency toward seeing life in terms of making sure we get what we're owed as a matter of personal right, it seems to me, shortens just a little the path to the kind of paranoia that blames anything that goes wrong on the conspiracies of a tyrannical government.
by CNB