Tribune-Star editorial: The execution of Timothy McVeigh

Let our thoughts be with victims

Painful imagery should be pushed aside today

Today we should think more of good things than of bad.

Our thoughts should linger more on Timothy J. McVeigh's victims than McVeigh; on their lives rather than his death.

But that's not an easy thing to do.

Today you may have heard the church bells tolling in Terre Haute -168 times, once for each of the mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, sisters and brothers whose lives were taken from them so abruptly that warm spring day six years ago.

The innocents and their deaths in Oklahoma City, a murderer and his death in a prison outside Terre Haute - life and death so intertwined in a jumbled weave of coincidence and cause and effect, so shrouded in sadness that a nation finds it hard to consider one and not the other.

So we return again and again to scenes borne by the news media that were seared, forever, into our collective memory:

• Laughing youngsters in a day-care center
• Smoke, dust, shattered walls
• McVeigh proudly photographed in a crisp Army khaki
• A fireman carrying a bleeding baby from the rubble
• The colorful, patriotic flutter of a flag outside the Murrah Building
• Shocked disbelief on faces in the gathering crowd
• McVeigh, lean and clean-cut, led handcuffed to his trial
• A man's face, wet with tears, as he grieved for a wife dead in that day's horror.

But we must try to turn our thoughts away from such painful imagery. Think instead of life, of promise, of nurturing families, of bright futures.

Yes, today we should think more of good things than of bad. Our thoughts should linger more on McVeigh's victims than McVeigh; on their lives rather than his death. But that's not an easy thing to do.

Maybe it will be easier tomorrow.

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