OKLAHOMA STRONG

Most conversations I have with total strangers in Oklahoma begin with a warm smile and the assumption that we’re already friends. With its wide open sky and limitless horizon the land itself shapes people here and informs them with a deep faith in life’s boundless possibilities. To make an Oklahoma Cocktail mix equal parts Southern hospitality and Yankee industriousness, add a splash of prairie populism, stir, and then take it to church twice on Sunday.

My first impressions of Oklahomans were formed in 1995 while watching coverage of the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. Oklahoma City had become the new home of old friends and so I closely followed the reports back then and saw what we all saw. The response to that event set a remarkable standard of caring and compassion. We witnessed one senseless act of hatred followed by ten thousand acts of kindness. Frightened people, shaken to the core, ran toward danger to help those in need. Injured people reached out to comfort their fellow wounded. There was no looting. There was an unparalleled level of cooperation and volunteerism. A family bond was formed among the afflicted who felt instant kinship within a harsh crucible where the complexities of name and rank gave way to the simplicity of survival, and where everyone’s skin was the same color of dust and ashes.

When we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of an event it leaves us at a loss for words. Putting something into words means being removed from it by a step, and when an experience is so intense that it closes the distance objectivity requires, words fail us, and we repeat the same phrases and expressions over and over before returning to our essential nature of open awareness, and our first language, silence. It is also worth noting that in the face of devastation we tend to let go of anything we’re carrying that would keep us from each other. I think this is what led one pilgrim soul to observe that there’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area. He had in mind those moments when we work together and put aside our differences, leave behind our grievances, are less contracted into self-serving viewpoints, and just do what needs to be done. I see this in Oklahoma. It’s one of the reasons I love this place. Another reason is that hardly a day goes by without someone saying something kind and encouraging. That’s just the way it is here. Such is the spirit of these good people. Their spirit enables them to endure; it accounts for their resiliency, and it makes them strong. It makes them Oklahoma strong.