Dan Boren: “At 9:02 a.m. on the morning of April 19th, 1995, a truck bomb detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in…”

“At 9:02 a.m. on the morning of April 19th, 1995, a truck bomb detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City killing 168 individuals--all of them unsuspecting women, children, and men--thereby becoming one of the most abhorrent acts of violence ever undertaken against the American people. Fifteen years after the bombing, we recognize on this day--April 19th, 2010--all those both in Oklahoma and across the United States who were touched by this inexplicable articulation of violence, violence which signaled an irrevocable act of domestic terrorism. Our recollections of that nascent dawn are consequently entombed within these words as a small yet vital elegy to the mid-April daylight a decade and a half ago when our world exploded. We cannot and we must not allow the events from 15 years past to lapse in our memories.”