After the bombing: public scenarios and the construction of meaning

In both our folk psychology and mental health practice, we adhere to the modernist view that a crisis is something that an individual has. A crisis is either something that happens to people or which people bring on themselves because of character pathology. On the other hand, postmodern theorists now draw our attention to how processes of interaction provide opportunities for certain characterizations to emerge and disipate. Both the conceptualization of an event as a crisis and the scenarios of how it is best understood arise within a community and emerge out of the communal construction of meaning. In this process in Oklahoma City, bystanders, politicians, pilgrims and news media played a role of great significance. Whether local or from afar, they became a community of observers who interacted with one another and looked to one another for verification as to what counted as a crisis and what behavior was appropriate. Lindy has observed that traumatized individuals are often surrounded quickly by a small network of trusted people who serve to buffer and protect them and who define what is helpful and what constitutes further trauma. Here, in Oklahoma, however, a wider public defined the event as a crisis, elaborated on it, and have gradually transformed it into almost mythic proportions, a process now exemplified in the construction of the Oklahoma City National Monument. However, they have also endorsed diverse other scenarios, not all of which have facilitated appropriate grieving, repair of life-disruption, or moving on. All, however, seem to have given a sense of meaning to the event. In this rich matrix, some survivors and their families have felt helped. Others have felt exploited. Still others have wanted to forget the whole thing and to avoid anything that reminded them of it. Of the would-be helpers, some felt unjustly rejected and unappreciated. Others felt appreciated, useful, and even enriched. However, a true legacy of the bombing may well be the metalogue it can precipitate and advance about the relationship between individuals and society, and especially the relationship between our individual life-stories and larger public scenarios, and the effects these scenarios have on the questions we can ask, what we can perceive and what solutions we can create.