I want to preface this by saying I don’t write personal stories.  I don’t like the focus of a story to be on me, but something came up today that necessitates it.  My home ABC affiliate in Oklahoma City, KOCO-TV,  is covering a story tonight about a meme that we posted on our Facebook page.  The one below:

I made this meme.  And I was born, raised, and still own a home in the Oklahoma town where I grew up.  I go home several times a year, I talk to my mom several times a week, and bless his heart, my PaPa calls me almost every day.

The OKC Bombing happened at a time in my life where I was just beginning to become conscious about the rest of the world, about politics, about a great number of things.  Looking back on it, I think watching it on TV every night, night after night… hearing the survivor stories year after year impacted me in a way that I’ve never quite been able to reconcile.  A teammate of my step-brother’s baseball team lost his father that day.  We later both sang in our high school choir.  I remember my friend Melissa being scared and crying because she couldn’t find her dad.  That was his office, and it took her much too long to find out he was out in the field that day.

My mom’s first big job as a grown-up that she held for many many years was in the OKC offices of the FDIC, so Mom always banked at the Federal Employees Credit Union at the bottom of the Murrah building. So when I opened my first bank account at 11 years old, it was at the same credit union.  It’s now called Allegiance and is located on Meridian, but I’ve never gone to another bank and I never will no matter where in the world I am living or how inconvenient it is to get a check deposited from half way across the country….

We read the 168 names year after year after year.  They were our family even if we didn’t even know them.  They were ours.  They were Oklahomans.

My point is this, and I speak to other Oklahomans, when you see mass shootings on TV now do you feel a special kinship with the survivors and families of the victims?  Do you, like me, know and feel their tragedy and loss and think about why we know that feeling so well?  And finally, do you ask yourself what the difference would be if McVeigh killed 168 people with a gun instead of with a bomb?  Would McVeigh still have been considered a terrorist if he used a gun instead?  Why don’t we call Jared Loughner who shot Gabby Giffords a terrorist?