Today is the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. There are good stories about the various markings and memorials at Excite News and the BBC, among others.

The day it happened was a Wednesday. I was actually a fairly early riser then, which would surpise most of the people who know me here in California. I was on my way to work at about 9 or so (I tended to get into my seat by 9:30) and had just started driving away from my house. I turned the radio from the local alt-rock station to NPR as I did every morning for my commute. They were talking about an explosion. Untold number dead. Descriptions of the vast damage to the building. Then they mentioned Oklahoma City, and the specific building. I nearly went off the road. Even writing about it now gives me a chill. OKC? WTF?

I spent a day or two getting through to family and friends. The odds of anyone I knew being in that building on the 19th were slim. I did have a lot of elderly family in the city, who might have reason to visit the Social Security Administration office in that building, but none of them would have gone that late in the month. None of my friends were even close to the area at the time. One friend was working an opening shift at a restaurant some number of miles away (I'm estimating it was about 5 miles), and he said that the remnants of the shock wave caused their front doors to swing open, then slowly close. The sound they heard could have been anything, but the doors spooked them.

Then the frenzy and finger-pointing began. Mind you, we're talking just hours here. People were sure they'd seen "Arab-looking" men around. (To be fair, downtown OKC is pretty much white and black, with only a smattering of Asian, Latino and others; someone Middle-Eastern would have been pretty conspicuous.) There was a lot of focus on Islamist possibilities, with "experts" already being interviewed on various radio stations.

Then the real shock came. The first sketches from actual eye-witnesses were of a man of decidedly white complexion. Then, to rub it home, they caught Tim McVeigh.

God help us, had we been attacked by someone with a clue. McVeigh was caught because he was speeding northbound on I-35 in a car with expired tags. When the cop came up to the window, there was a gun sitting on the passenger seat beside McVeigh. So he was taken into custody. And at that point, things started to add up and fall into place. Partial receipts were found. People remembered his face. And one person actually rolled over on him. But had he been blessed with the basic common sense that you don't speed in a car with bad tags, with a fucking gun in the front seat beside you, in the immediate aftermath of a highly-visible bombing, he might never have been caught. He might well be marking this anniversary in some modest house in Montana or Idaho, with the rest of his John Birch-quoting far-right militia fanatics. But he fucked up, we caught him, and he sleeps with the fishes. His accomplice will never see the outside of a prison, but at least has his life left with which to write more tracts about how the gub'mint is after our freedom and our guns (but not in that order).

Let me go on record as saying I don't believe for one minute that the plot to blow up the Murrah building had squat to do with the Branch Davidian stand-off in Waco, Texas, two years earlier. They may have chosen the date for that, so they could use it as an excuse. But I just don't believe a person who considers himself a Biblical Christian is going to get that worked up over an incident involving a man who claimed to be Christ Himself. They might have bristled at the government response (and really– if the party in power were the GOP, Pat Robertson would have been all about them stopping a false messiah, as opposed to oppressing the faithful). But someone committing the ultimate blasphemy and armed to the teeth? I don't see anyone in the Michigan Militia being in a great hurry to join the fight. I thing the Waco excuse was exactly that: an excuse. If it hadn't have been that, it would have been the assault weapons ban, or any other slight (real or perceived).

So today, I'm pretty much keeping quiet and just doing my day job. I'll go home and eat, and relax. And I'll be exceedingly thankful that no one I knew was directly affected. My SO at the time had friends who were hurt, and at least one friend who was a responding EMT. But that was as close as I got. There are 168 families that weren't so lucky.