| Home > Personal > Teaching about Trauma and Revisiting the Oklahoma City Bombing |
| Teaching about Trauma and Revisiting the Oklahoma City Bombing | | Date Created: Sep 19, 2004, 12:20 PM |
 I'm in Oklahoma City this week for a conference on teaching journalism students about covering trauma. The conference is sponsored by the Dart Center at the University of Washington. This is the second time Dart has held the conference; I attended the first one in Los Angeles last year and was asked to come back this year as the senior faculty member. In that role I got to share how I've tried to integrate what I learned last year into our capstone journalism class.
This year the Dart Center let us look in on an actual class at the University of Central Oklahoma as it used actors to role play interviews with victims of a (fictional) apartment fire. |
 We also visited the memorial for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. First we visited the memorial at sunset. It turns out this is the most stunning time of the day to see it.
The street on which Timothy McVeigh parked the bomb-filled Ryder truck is now blocked to traffic. Instead of pavement, a very shallow reflecting pool, which lends to a real feeling of reverence as soon as one enters the memorial.
The most imposing structures in the Memorial are the large gates at either end of the street. One reads 9:01, the other 9:03. The bomb exploded at 9:02, so the gates signify the profound change Oklahoma City, its residents, and the bombing's survivors have undergone because of the bombing.
My first impression upon entering the memorial was one of sadness and reverence. However, when I saw the chairs, my emotions suddenly turned to anger. |
 The ground where the Murrah Building once stood is now covered with chairs -- one for each victim of the bombing. Each of the chairs was made individually -- no two are the same -- signifying the individuality of each of the victims.
The next day we went inside the museum, which is in the building across the street (now the reflecting pool) from the Murrah Building site. It is the most clearly thought-out museum I have ever visited in my life.
The first part of the museum you see is what you'd expect from a museum -- that is to say, it's pretty mundane: scenes of everyday, normal life in Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing. This, like everything else in the museum, was done by design. The museum's designers, with imput from the survivors and families of bombing victims, wanted the museum's visitors to experience just how ordinary the city was before the bombing. |
 After viewing a series of pictures and exhibits about the Murrah Building and normal life in Oklahoma City, visitors are then led to a room. It's a very non-descript government-issue looking room with a conference table and some chairs. After the doors are closed, an audio tape is played. It's a tape of an actual government meeting that took place across the street from the Murrah Building. The meeting started shortly after 9:00 a.m. The sounds of the blast are heard on the tape. As we listen to the thunderous explosions and the screams, we see portraits of individuals projected on the wall. As the sound of the explosion dies down, these portraits fade from view.
The doors are then opened and visitors are led through a recreated scene of chaos. Overhead, large screen televisions play the initial reports of the explosion. Then, a dozen or so speakers, strategically placed, blare out the sounds of that horrible morning: police and fire radios, sirens, and worst of all, the screams. All around you see twisted metal, piles of bricks, shoes, eyeglasses, keys, file cabinets. I found the experience to be so effectively jarring that I felt dizzy, sick really.
The rest of the museum exhibits are respectful to the victims, sensitive to the survivors, and heart-rending even for those who did not experience the event first-hand.
I must bring my children to see this. |
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