The halfway point of tour was somewhere around Oklahoma. So far, the whole tour had gone well. No canceled shows. In my opinion, at a minimum, we played well at every show. Decent crowds at all the shows so far. I guess I should explain what I mean by ‘decent crowd’. Some may think ‘decent’ is seventy people. Some may think ‘decent’ is forty to fifty. Here’s what I mean by decent:

Ten. Ten people.

That’s a decent crowd in my book. Look, in almost every case it’s our first time in not only these cities but also these states. For some people, ten may be a disappointment and to some extent, it is (and by ‘some extent’ I mean that ‘some extent’ doesn’t fill your gas tank and doesn’t buy you food). Psychologically, I can take the disappointing route. I guess I could say, “Hey man, we’ve been around for something like three plus years. We play to hundreds of people back home man”. Well, that rationale is ridiculous and self-defeating. For us, if we played for ten people in Oklahoma City then I consider that pretty decent because that’s honestly more than we played to in our first six months of existence in Durham, our hometown.

Ten is great. Ten is Madison Square Garden.

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I like to sit and think. Solemn Reflection I guess you’d call it. I like going to Waffle Houses during their non-busy hours to do this. The biggest reason I like Waffle Houses over Coffee Shops is the lack of music in Waffle Houses. Yes, there is a jukebox but the jukebox doesn’t speak unless spoken to. Okay, so maybe every half an hour it plays a Waffle House promo song, the kind based on some popular country western song. Though I’ve heard them hundreds of times, I can’t recall any of them presently even though I am sitting in a Waffle House writing this. Coffee shops always have some kind of music going on. Even diners have some kind of music going on. Denny’s, too. Nobody’s perfect. Coffee Shops and Denny’s have their purpose for me but it is not for Solemn Reflection.

I try and do some solemn reflection on tour but that’s kinda tough. Usually I retreat to the van for an hour or so. Once, we played a house show in Philadelphia. It was suffocating in the house during the happening hours so I went to the van and peeled a Clementine.

For an hour.

Nothing beats a good batch of Clementines. I try and peel each in one long continuous strand starting at its South Pole and finishing at its North. I know, it sounds a little Colonel Kurtz-ish. All I need is a small village of savages and Dennis Hopper and I can recreate My Own Private Apocalypse. What can I say? It’s soothing, I guess. At the time, I thought it was really silly sitting there peeling a Clementine for entertainment but then I thought what’s the difference in doing that and sitting on my couch at home flipping through the channels for three hours?

Sometimes just sitting there is good for you. Healthy. Just sitting there with nothing but your thoughts. No television. No music. My Pap used to sit on the porch of his house for hours and hours. Just sitting there watching kids play or clouds pass. That’s what people did before the need to be doing something all…the…time. It’s just you and the gears in your noggin.

Like I said, healthy.

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But sometimes the problem with Solemn Reflection is that you may not like where you end up. This is very important to keep in mind as you read the next section. I will repeat that sentence throughout the next section: Sometimes the problem with Solemn Reflection is that you may not like where you end up.

Sometimes where you end up is not where you stay. Maybe you go back to the beginning and rethink the whole thing over again. Sometimes you move forward a little bit into a scary unknown. Either way, where you are at that exact moment is not where you thought you’d be when you started down that initial Thought Path.

I know that when I write these blogs, I tend to have a joke-y kind of tone (see first section) and I’d like to preface this next section by saying that it contains a drastically more serious tone.

Part of the reason that I’m writing these blogs is for my own documentation but if I wanted to just do that, then I’d write them and keep them for myself to read at some later point in life. The other reason that I write these is to share our experiences with you. Some of these experiences are funny. Others are life changing. This experience is one of the latter kind. It could be upsetting. Most life changing experiences are…at least a little bit.

It’s also important that you read the whole thing. It always is. I tend to spout and rant here and there and say a lot of things that you may not agree with. But these blogs are more often than not explaining a process or explaining a series of incidents that may have convinced me of a different position than I initially thought, an initial position that you may not have agreed with even though you’d agree with the conclusion…if you decided to read its entirety.

I debated whether or not to post this. I wasn’t sure if what I’m trying to get across… gets across. I had several people read this before posting.

I’m still not sure.

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Sometimes the problem with solemn reflection is that you may not like where you end up.

I don’t like to go to a city and hang out in the venue we are playing in for hours. It’s not good for my head. Or soul. If possible, I like to go to some thrift stores or pawnshops or some type of Monument or Memorial. I like taking back roads if we can. I like seeing my country. If I can help it, I don’t want sit in some bar for five hours waiting to play.

Here we are in Oklahoma City.

Beth was here about a year ago. A program that she works with at UNC called Carolina for Kibera received the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum 2008 Reflections of Hope Award, an award that commended CFK’s work fighting abject poverty and violence prevention through community-based development in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. When she came home from that trip, she said that the Oklahoma City National Memorial was unbelievable and very powerful. She mentioned that if we ever had the chance to go, we should.

Now here we are.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial. For those who don’t know or can’t remember, at 9:02 CST on April 19, 1995, in a domestic attack, a van full of explosives detonated in front of the nine-story Alfred P. Hurrah Federal Building, a government office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured. The van exploded by a loading dock near the building’s Day Care Center.

It’s hard for me to believe that some of you reading this weren’t even born then.

The Memorial is truly unbelievable. It is exceptionally powerful. The design is remarkable. There is a survivor tree, a part of the original landscaping that miraculously survived the blast. Next to the tree is the following:

“(The memorial) includes a reflecting pool about sixty feet long flanked by two large “gates”, one inscribed with the time 9:01, the opposite with 9:03, the pool between representing the moment of the blast. On the south end of the memorial is a field full of symbolic bronze and stone chairs—one for each person lost, arranged based on what floor they were on. The chairs represent the empty chairs at the dinner tables of the victims’ families. The seats of the children killed are smaller than those of the adults lost”*

You can see the layout here: Oklahoma City National Memorial

Fifteen of the victims were children in the day care center located in the building. Fifteen kids. When you see the adult chairs described above, and then you see these little chairs, you wish that there were a padded room somewhere in the memorial for you to go and collapse under the tears and weight of this unbearable misery.

The bombing was the largest terrorist attack on American Soil before the September 11 attacks. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

To me, the most terrifying thing is that last sentence. Domestic Terrorism. One of us. With a foreign terrorist attack, in my opinion it helps psychologically to know that it was done by someone else from somewhere else. They are reported as Crazy People. Why did they do it? They were crazy. End of story. You wouldn’t believe what their religion allows them to do, man. Crazy. Insane.

But this? Done by an American. From the heartland. Insane? He didn’t plead it. Nobody would believe it if he did. Done by a former soldier that served in the first Gulf War. He wrote letters to his local paper complaining about taxes. He quit the NRA because he thought their views on gun ownership were too weak.

I have friends, great friends, whose background and thoughts are very similar to his, okay? I want you all to know that those same friends have visited the Memorial and reacted with the same sadness and disgust that I did. Even though I disagree with their political views, we are still near and dear friends. We are adults. Adults can do that. I would also like to clarify that I do not think that everyone who doesn’t like taxes or owns a gun or is a former soldier is some kind of whack job. That’s a very easy thing to do: someone doesn’t think like you? They are crazy, man. I don’t think that a combination of any of these beliefs means you’re going to be a domestic terrorist or that you will even sympathize with the men who carried out the Oklahoma City Bombing. My stating those facts in the paragraph above could turn into an Us vs. Them, Liberal vs. Conservative, Democrat vs. Republican type thing and it shouldn’t. The victims were from all cross sections of society. The people that showed up to help were from all cross sections. The people that donated to the Memorial were from all political parties and countries and religions.

The guy that did this became obsessed with the U.S. Government’s raid on a compound at Waco, Texas and wanted to enact revenge. He carried quotes by Thomas Jefferson around with him. And John Wilkes Booth.

This Memorial…it’s so powerful because there’s nothing to read. There’s no distraction. There’s no immediate tour. There is a Museum but it had closed by the time we arrived. We just saw the Memorial. Just a big emptiness. A big nothing.

Nothing but two walls, a tree, a reflecting pool and some chairs.

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Again, the problem with solemn reflection is sometimes you don’t like where you end up. And once again, keep this in mind as you read all of this please.

There are two black walls. One says 9:01. The other says 9:03. In between is a pool of water. It is a very thin pool the thickness of a quarter.

I want to collapse. I don’t know why I am holding back my tears. These tourists with me are strangers. I will never see them again. But I am embarrassed. I shouldn’t have come here. I want a room at this Memorial where I can go and collapse. It has to be padded. Has to be because I don’t know how many times I’ll ram myself into a wall, just a bubbling, gurgling mess of a human being.

There are the chairs. 168 chairs.

There are fifteen little chairs.

Those tiny chairs.

I want to vomit.

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Staring at the blackness of the Reflecting Pool, a story I read was reflected back to me:

A Mother eating at a table with her husband and their 2 year-old son.

Then this.

This explosion.

No warning.

The mother is immediately buried in rubble. There is a ringing high-pitched buzz in her ear. She digs herself out. There is dust and rock all around her. She’s crawling around, clawing at the ground, looking for her child. She’s crying, she’s screaming ‘My child, my child.’ She is surrounded by what were formerly walls and ceiling and roof. She looks to where a window used to be. She finds her husband. He, like everything else, is covered in the dust of the former building. He could blend in, she thinks. Why am I thinking this? He could blend in. He could disappear into the background like camouflage. He could vanish. But she can see his eyes. She sees him blink slowly. She sees a slight trickle of blood from his head. He is conscious. He is okay. Tears run down his cheeks making a chasm in the dirt. He holds her. She holds him.

But where is our son?

Her husband keeps shouting for him. She is hysterical. She can’t control what her body is doing. It is maddening, this loss of control. She hears her husband shouting. There is no response.

He starts to dig. He must be here, my son. He must be here. There was a table here. Our chairs were right here. He was here just a minute ago. We were all here just a minute ago. He digs in the rubble through what was, just minutes ago, a building.

And now, it is nothing.

There was a family here, just minutes ago.

And now, nothing.

He dug for two hours saying to himself, “I will not leave my son. I will find him. I will take him out of here.”

The fire company came and helped him find his son. Eventually they did find him. In the ambulance, the Father held his son’s small cold hand in his own. The child’s name was Ali Hussein.

He died that day in Baghdad. April 29th, 2008.**

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I read that story a year ago. It was different than other stories coming from Baghdad because there was a name. Ali Hussein. At the Oklahoma City Memorial, after just standing there and thinking and reflecting by this Reflecting Pool, that story came to me again. I couldn’t distinguish between Ali and the other 15 year-old kids. I couldn’t just file them away in two separate file cabinets in the back of my head, two cabinets labeled “Acceptable” and “Unacceptable”. Look, I know that no death of a child, any child, is ever considered “acceptable”. This month’s Time Magazine reported that since 2005, there have been 87,215 civilian deaths in Iraq.

Statistics and numbers. There are no Ali Hussein’s there. Just ones and sevens and tens. Numbers.

No names. Makes it a lot easier to accept. Numbers make it acceptable for all of us.

Yet, how many of those 87, 215 civilian deaths were kids? How many were families that just didn’t give a shit anymore about this war and just wanted the bombs to stop so they can eat in peace? In Peace. How many just wanted their kids to be able to go outside and kick around a soccer ball for a few hours and you know, just be a fucking kid? How many forgot why this whole thing started? How many didn’t know why this started in the first place? How many of you know why this started in the first place? How many kids survived but at the age of two or four or six…they’re just not a kid anymore? They’ll grow up with bombs all around them. Kids shouldn’t hear that shit. Nobody should.

There is a night and day difference between what happened in Oklahoma City and what happened in Baghdad. That is not why I wrote this. That’s not why I thought what I did. I have friends and family that have served in the Military. I have former students that still do serve. And I am proud and inspired by all of them.

Who was responsible for Ali Hussein’s death? I don’t care. Some may. I don’t. Not then at the Memorial and not writing this now. I’m not putting the original article in here for a reason and I’m not clarifying it in my paraphrase either. There is no one person, group or government to blame here and placing blame is not my intention.

I want to emphasize again with regards to locale and purpose and persons and intentions involved, there is no comparison, okay? There are a multitude of differences between what happened to the children in Oklahoma City and what happened to Ali Hussein in Bagdad.

But there are similarities too.

And how many of those similarities aren’t going to get a Chair Memorial?

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The problem with solemn reflection is sometimes you just can’t take the reflection.

Sometimes where you end up is not where you stay. Maybe you go back to the beginning and rethink the whole thing over again. Sometimes you move forward a little bit into a scary unknown. Either way, where you are at that exact moment is not where you thought you’d be when you started down that initial Thought Path.

*(From Zachary White, The Search For Redemption Following the Oklahoma City Bombing: Amending the Boundaries Between Public and Private Grief):

**Paraphrased from an article from ABC News by Marcus Baram

Jason