This guest opinion column comes to us from Constance Squires, Ph.D., a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond and the author of “Low April Sun,” A new novel exploring the psychological aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing.
At some point in the last several years—perhaps since COVID—we all seem to have become much more conversant in psychological diagnoses and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Whereas I used to teach college students who I might become aware were struggling and who might explain by saying they were having trouble getting organized, or having a hard time fitting in, or they were sleeping too much, I now have students who have the vocabulary to detail their struggles with anxiety or depression, with ADHD, or even to let me know they have borderline personality disorder, or PTSD.
I’ve experienced the same shift in awareness in myself and among my friends and have understood things that I never had language for before.
None of these terms or conditions are new, but what is new is the average person’s awareness of the categories and their defining characteristics.
Lay people in psychology, most of us, there is surely some error that goes into these self-identifications and our armchair diagnoses of our friends and family. Still, awareness usually does good, and I find myself thinking, as we approach the thirty-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, what we might see about Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer who perpetrated the bombing, were he alive today.
The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, before it was an act of unspeakable horror, was an idea that stuck in the brain of a disconnected, and disillusioned incel (before we had the term) named Timothy McVeigh.
In the months after he left active-duty military service, he drove around the U.S. from gun show to gun show, Rush Limbaugh coming over the radio as his primary companion on the road. McVeigh grew fixated with the idea of striking a blow against the government and the idea developed its own momentum in his mind.
Maybe the old language knew how to identify the problem, too: “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Indeed.
McVeigh had no other plans, so his identity and sense of his own importance seem to have been sucked into the gravitational pull of this growing idea. He wasn’t working steadily, so he structured his time by driving to different states and checking out their federal buildings, assessing their security and structural integrity.
What does that mindset indicate? Did he have antisocial personality disorder, was he clinically depressed, was he on the autism spectrum?
Before we had the internet to silo our interests and insulate us from the complexity of diverse opinions, it was harder for someone to become as alienated as McVeigh was, but it was still possible. Now, of course, it’s far easier and more common.
What’s also far more common are his unfortunate ideas.
McVeigh’s antigovernment, white-supremacist beliefs were surprising to most Americans when we started to learn about them in the days after the bombing.
We learned that he chose the date of April 19th to commemorate the Waco siege two years earlier, and the kick-offs to the American Revolutionary War, the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
We learned that he was activated by the Clinton administration’s assault weapons ban, seeming to slide without resistance down a slippery-slope of logical fallacies to the bottom basement conviction that the federal government would soon take all of our guns and hold us all prisoner in a nation-sized gulag.
In 1995, most people weren’t so aware of what we now call the alt-right out there trying to dignify their own failures by blaming history. Now we are.
The world watched consumers of these self-serving narratives come out of what seemed like nowhere – but was in fact our own neighborhoods – and take up arms against the United States on January 6. 2021, airing the same ideas McVeigh proudly explained in the weeks and months after the bombing, another federal building attacked by attackers who perceived themselves as victims.
I can think of little more terrifying than to realize that here, at the thirty-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, we are, more than ever, struggling through dark times of the sort hoped for by Timothy McVeigh.
In my new novel, “Low April Sun,” the opening paragraph is spoken by a character named August, neurodiverse in ways that I do not specify in the novel, who, as a teenaged boy living at Elohim City with his parents, met Timothy McVeigh sometime in the months before the Oklahoma City bombing. He reflects on meeting McVeigh, asks himself how his life would have been different if their paths hadn’t crossed.
“Some other life would’ve been mine. But I did meet ol’Tim, back in August of ’94, and that meeting was enough for him to stretch his long shadow down the years of my life and make them dark as a highway without headlights. I been trying to make it right ever since.” So have we all.
That psychology of believing that other people are pawns to your own internal thoughts and feelings—that other people should suffer or die for what’s going on between your ears — is such a lack of empathy what defines psychopathy, malignant narcissism, some other Cluster B disorder, or all of them at once?
Prison psychologists who dealt with McVeigh probably know, but maybe the old terminology suffices here, too. Maybe it doesn’t matter why Timothy McVeigh’s mind was so reactive to the hate ideology he imbibed, only that he did imbibe it and did react in a way that hurts us all to this day.
Perhaps it’s just the effect that matters, and what McVeigh did was capital-E-evil. But when I think about my students, their self-awareness and their openness, I hope that the new granularity of our vocabulary for mental struggles can notice and name, can catch and save, the potential Timothy McVeighs of our time before they act.
For more from Constance Squires, visit constancesquiresofficial.com.
Our Community Voices opinion section is for people in the community to submit reasoned and well-written opinion for the sake of advancing public discourse. If you live in Oklahoma and want to submit a piece for us to consider publishing, please write to info (at) freepressokc (dot) com.
