History, justice and Timothy McVeigh
Perhaps now we can look to brighter days
The execution of Timothy J. McVeigh was the final page in a horrible and infamous chapter in our history.
McVeigh himself wrote the opening words Sept. 13, 1994, when he began a plot to repay his government for fiery Waco and bloody Ruby Ridge. A few days later he bought the first ton of ammonium nitrate at a Kansas farm co-op for a simple-but-murderous homemade bomb.
Seven months later, on April 19, 1995, he punctuated his terrible saga when he detonated the fuel-and-fertilizer device in Oklahoma City, gutting the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The toll: 168 unsuspecting men, women and children dead, hundreds more injured.
A jury of McVeigh's fellow citizens summed up its entry June 2, 1996, in Denver: guilty on 11 counts of murder and conspiracy; guilty of masterminding and carrying out America's worst act of domestic terrorism. Two weeks later, a unanimous sentence from the same jury sealed McVeigh's fate.
Early Monday, the warden in a Terre Haute prison had the final word when he signaled for the dose of deadly drugs to be pumped into McVeigh's waiting body.
Timothy J. McVeigh is gone, made small by death.
If only death could also rewrite memory of the twisted man and his brutal act into no more than a single, small footnote in history. The innocents he slaughtered, though, the children and men and women whose loved ones will never hear them laugh again, they deserve much more.
They deserve endless pages in which we chronicle their lives.
They deserve a special place in our national consciousness.
As distasteful as McVeigh's execution was, for the nation it embodied an essential culmination of justice -- a statement underscoring the inescapable nature of personal responsibility. For the families of his victims we can only hope that his demise, the final grim effect of his own dark cause, brought a closure of sorts.
We know they will never forget their losses, and our hearts go out to them. But with McVeigh finally gone, perhaps they can allow time to begin to heal the wounds he caused. Perhaps now we can all begin to focus more on brighter days ahead than painful days endured.
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