Tim, I Know How You Feel:
The Unbreakable Bond Between Us
First of all, I am not including this essay I'm about to write in order to explain away just why I became a Timothy McVeigh supporter or how I came to construct this page, which is both a testament to a man whom most detested and a damning commentary on capital punishment. No, I am writing this so that, perhaps, you will begin to comprehend just why I felt a kinship with McVeigh and could understand the mind of a frightening bomber who felt that destroying the Alfred P. Murrah building was something that, as he told his father during their last time together, it was something he had to do.
As anyone who has read the chapter about a terrible Behaviour Modification ward in my autobiography---it's posted on his site----they will come to understand both how I know full well the effects that prolonged stays in an institution can change one and why I feel a kinship toward Timothy McVeigh.
Now, if anyone reading this thinks for one minute that I am crying the blues by including "Auschwitz In the London Psychiatric Hospital" and should just "get over it," I will interject here that my purpose for giving you a painful gimpse into the kind of life one withstood in a backward mental hospital is to show, adequately, I hope, that I know what institutional life is like and how quickly, despite bad conditions and with copious amounts of psycholical, physical and sexual abuse, someone can become institutionalized. Tim also suffered plenty in prison and, if by some minutely small chance, he would ever have been released, it would simply be a matter of time before he returned. I have never broken the "revolving door" circle and likely never will.
But killing Tim McVeigh wasn't the answer. The correct remedy was to make the prison take on the responsibilty of talking to death row imates, giving them good councelling and offering assignments and agenda to foster self-esteem and to lesson the heavy depression that all condemned prisoners feel at one time or another. I got help because I only tried to take myself out, not anyone else and certainly not 168 people. But when it comes right down to it, the line separating me from those who murder is chillingly thin and wispy.
At this point, I would like to interject that I have already read halfway through "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing and, although my methods of protest are peaceful ones, I found a great deal in Tim's childhood and young adulthood that somewhat eerily paralleled mine. Told by friends that I would end up hating McVeigh if I read the book, I have to point out here that such hasn't been the case. Perhaps a small part of me really did want to find him to be little more than pond scum and that he got what he deserved this past June 11th, but, when I sit down and quietly think about it all, I believe even the Tim McVeighs of the world deserve my compassion.
Unless you have come to the very brink of self-destruction, you cannot begin to imagine what an impact that has on a person's life. I'm not writing this to elicit sympathy from my readers----conversely, I despise pity and sympathy---but because there is so much more to summing up a person's psyche and his or her actions than by just using the blanket explanation of "well, he/she is just hopelessly twisted and evil."
What is the concept of evil as we perceive it? Does it surface in one who meticulously plans and executes an action that takes scores and scores of lives and then claims to feel no remorse for such a crime? Is it the madman in Germany, some fifty-six years ago, who ordered the extermination of six million Jews? Or is it the sociopathic little girl who deliberately feeds poisoned ice cream to a stray cat, just to watch it writhe in pain and agony? There is so much more to the meaning behind wickedness and Satanic behaviour than we will ever learn in a lifetime---even in ten lifetimes. All I can surmise, both from reading "American Terrorist" and following the McVeigh story from day one, is that the "evil" embodied by the young, disillusioned war veteran from Pendleton, New York and the little girl who possesses no hint of a conscience, pales in comparrison with someone who promoted genocide, namely, Adolph Hitler. He made his victims suffer the horror of starvation and death by thirst, not to mention the psychological anguish felt by those unfortunate people as they watched loved ones being dragged off to Hitler's infamous ovens.
To harken back to the psychological factors significant in the Oklahoma City case, we cannot hold Tim McVeigh solely accountable for his crime---at least, we should not completely condemn him for what happened in America's heartland on that terrible April morning of 1995. Yes, he premeditated the attack, right down to the most minute detail, but he was also tormented by demons that corroded his compassion and clouded his judgement to such an extent that his own conscience---and he did have one---was supressed as the fervor for revenge on a government that had failed him and let him down repeatedly, took over completely and transformed this quiet, shy and unassuming young man into one of the worst killing machines ever to grace American soil.
Yes, I could have been a McVeigh. Halfway through my junior year at Toronto's York University, my mind snapped and I wound up in a frightening mental hospital and subjected to many shock treatments and medications that had extremely unpleasant side effects. That hospital stay was the first in many, many that would continue on to the present---indeed, when I found out that Judge Matsch had denied Tim McVeigh another stay of execution this past June 6th, I became quite hysterical and was again shipped off to the mental ward for a number of weeks. I had convinced myself that Tim wasn't going to be killed after all and I was very wrong. Unlike me, Tim went to his death with a stoic resolve, determined not to show any iota of fear or panic. He died as he had lived. I do not know if, when my time comes to meet Jesus, I will be that relaxed about it.
Yes, Timothy James McVeigh should have at least had some councelling when he returned home from the Persian Gulf. The war broke him down, psychologically and desensitized him to killing human beings. I believe that all war veterans should be carefully examined when they return home instead of just greeted as heroes and then leaving them in a black void, struggling to reconnect with a world so different from the one overseas. I know that many agree with me that McVeigh, on that day he ran, crying, to the home of his beloved grandfather shortly after the war, should have been hospitalized and treated, perhaps with antidepressants. He just couldn't fathom why he was rewarded for killing during Desert Storm, but hated for doing just that to his fellow Americans. He honestly was incapable of figuring that out and it helped lead to his fatal actions.
I am still being treated with medication for my illness. Who knows what I might have done, had I never ended up in that hospital in Toronto. Perhaps, instead of joining Ploughshares and protesting peacefully against the stockpiling of nuclear weapons during the Cold War in the 1980's, I may have detonated a bomb of my own at the Litton plant, which, at the time, was manufacturing guidance systems for Cruise missiles.
We cannot continue to hate Tim McVeigh. Despise what he did, but feel a certain sense of compassion for him.