From the column: Follow-up

By Jennifer J. Foster

I promised you a follow-up post to my Saturday column.

If you read the column, you know it’s about the importance of having respect in political discourse. Well, I got this e-mail from a reader around 12:30 p.m. Saturday, just a few hours after the paper hit the street. I have redacted the reader’s name but left everything else just as it was written.

It is extermely amusing to see you liberals squirm when conservatives start to band together to oppose the direction the democrats are trying to take the country.
We endured 8 years of harsh critisim and harsh language about President Bush from the liberal side with little complaint.
Now we are supposed to just forget the past years and let you liberals do what you want and never raise a complaint.
You want us all to be friends and like one another.
I have no intrest in being friends with or supporting the socialist agenda of you liberals.
I think the Governor of Texas has it right about getting out of the union you liberals need our tax money to support your agenda a lot more than we need any of you.

My first reaction was that the reader missed the point of my column. But then I realized that he was actually making it for me. As I responded to him, I couldn’t have conceived a better example of what I was talking about in the column than his e-mail.

I noted in my response that Saturday wasn’t the first time I broached the subject of respectful political discourse. I directed him to my earlier column, from last year, on the subject (you can read that column here).

Interesting, huh?

This week’s column

By Jennifer J. Foster

If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I was really excited for my most recent column to hit the street Saturday. I always feel strongly about what I write, but for whatever reason (or maybe a combination of reasons), I felt especially passionate about this week’s issue.

If you missed it in the Saturday print edition of the Opelika-Auburn News, I invite you to read it now on the web:

Not everyone who disagrees with you politically is your enemy

The paper hadn’t been on the street but for about six hours when I got an interesting e-mail from a reader. Stay tuned; I’ll tell you about it in a followup item in a bit.

Tragic anniversaries

By Jennifer J. Foster

There is a lot of sadness in America today.

Yesterday marked the 14-year anniversary of the day Timothy McVeigh exploded a huge bomb in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in what had been until that day an unimaginable act of domestic terrorism.

For many Americans (including this one), the enduring image of that day is of a fireman cradling the battered body of a Baylee Almon.

She had just turned 1 the day before.

If the bombing of an American building by an American citizen was unimaginable in itself, so much more were the deaths in that building of Baylee and 18 other babies and young children who were being cared for in the day care facility there. It added unspeakable trauma to an event that was already more traumatic than most Americans had faced on their own soil.

I was a senior in high school on April 19, 1995. We watched the coverage of the bombing on televisions in our rooms. The idea that someone born and raised in America could do this to so many of his fellow citizens—citizens he never even met, who had no idea who this man was and could have had no part in wronging him—was something new and disturbing to me. I remember thinking that although I knew couldn’t fully grasp all the implications of this day, the world had forever been changed, and I was watching it happen.

Four years later, I was working on my internship at the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer in my last quarter before college graduation. I was at work on April 20, 1999, when news reports began to come in about a shooting at a high school in Colorado.

Within hours, the name of Columbine would become synonymous with unspeakable tragedy.

Everyone gathered beneath the overhead television monitors, and we joined with others around the world who watched the news unfolding from the scene. The images were profound and sickening—teenagers running out of various parts of the building with their hands above their heads ... the seemingly hundreds of law enforcement and rescue vehicles, their occupants desperate to help, to do something—anything—but paralyzed by confusion and misinformation ... broken glass everywhere ... someone chased through, then tackled in, an open field ... the wounded lain out on the grass ... and most enduring: The stricken student tumbling from a second-story window and into the waiting arms of SWAT team members.

I looked around at my colleagues—lifelong newsmen and women who had covered all manner of local, regional and national tragedies. Their eyes were as transfixed on those monitors and their mouths as agape as mine.

It occurred to me that never, not once, during my time in high school did the thought ever cross my mind that someone could bring a gun to school and start shooting. It didn’t even exist as a remote possibility.

In less than an hour, the killers of Columbine forever destroyed that happy innocence for teenagers.

Again, the world had changed—and not for the better—before my eyes.

Take some time to remember these tragedies today. Remember the victims and their families.

My thoughts and prayers are with them today.

See also:

The Wiki entry on the Oklahoma City bombing

“Loss Still Felt as Oklahoma City Bombing Anniversary Commemorated,“ from Fox News

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum web site

The Wiki entry on the Columbine shooting

“Columbine students strive 10 years after massacre,“ an AP story with updates on some of the survivors—including Patrick Ireland, who tumbled out of the library window

“Remembering Columbine,“ a CNN report

The Columbine Memorial Foundation web site