From the words of a children ‘s story — Disney’s Aladdin: A dark man waits with a dark purpose.

Oklahoma City, Okla. April 19,1995:

Another day dawned around the world.

Airplanes took off and landed. People loaded cramped, smelly cars with children a little less cranky after a night in a crowded motel, and hoped to avoid rush hour traffic as they hurried off to the next destination on their vacation itinerary.

As grocery stores and gas stations opened their doors to the blinking, sleepy eyes of the morning light, and night workers headed home to make this morning their nighttime, others were setting their day in motion.

They had planned and worked and waited. They were not getting married today or starting a new job. They waited to commit murder. They had a statement to make; a lesson to teach to people they would never know.

Their target: A few hundred men, women and children. They believed these people to be deserving of their message.

In a downtown daycare, a toddler may have tugged at a hem to be picked up.

He may have been watching two of his small playmates tugging on a little red and yellow airplane that he had lost to one of them.

He may have needed a good hug or some help with the complexities of the bathroom.

He may have been building a most marvelous castle with big red cardboard bricks and needed to show this fine thing to someone.

He may have been just about to put on the top brick of his tallest castle ever, and as he reached for the top the world around him exploded.

Buses pulled onto streets and turned eager, yellow noses toward children dreading their arrival.

Someone in the city woke today and remembered the night before and the day before and the Sunday before.

The floor must have begun to quiver and move as sound and pain he couldn’t even define blasted at his ears and head. How does a child comprehend the hurling and heaving of plaster, walls, wood, glass, toys and people?

Were there flashes of light or flame, or blackness? What does the inside of an explosion look like?

Lunch boxes were filled, coffee pots gurgled and dripped. Friends talked to friends.

Families talked to families. Someone tickled a baby before changing its diaper, and someone picked up a tuxedo because someone else was getting married today.

Could he hear screams of other children and the adults there to care for them, or only terrible booming blasts of roaring sound; What does the inside of an explosion sound like?

Mothers and fathers hustled sleepy children, and briefcases were checked, snapped and tucked under arms.

Neighbors got in arguments over silly things, and people made love and made babies and made beds.

Did he feel intense, searing heat immediately, or glass cutting him, or concrete and debris crushing, breaking or tearing through him? What does the inside of an explosion feel like?

Newspapers were read, and TV’s and radios reported weather, events, home tips and recipes.

Someone in the city picked up a crippled child and carried her. Someone listened to a voice on the phone for another hour on a suicide hot-line.

Was it over before any impression could register on the mind; a blink and the blocks are not there and all that can be seen or felt is wetness, rubble, darkness, and terrible pain? How long does an explosion take to rip a building apart? How long does an explosion take to happen to a child?

The world echoed with a cacophony of sounds and vibrated with activity.

How does a child comprehend that someone deliberately made this happen? How does anyone?

A toddler lies terrified and mangled in what is left of his world, and he can’t possibly understand where he is.

The news of his catastrophe races around the world, into gas stations and homes and playgrounds and grocery stores, and back again. News of just where he is, or at least, where he was.

Somewhere, a single voice speaks, yet all the world will not hear. But the voice is growing and swelling as millions of single voices begin speaking, and the universe reverberates with the immensity of it.

This enormous, single voice asks one simple question that no one anywhere can answer: Why?

People with dark purposes cannot care about these things. Their atrocious acts speak volumes of symbolic meaning to them and those who are with them.

They somehow believe that their message will scream out to all the world their intent and purpose, but my own children came home from school today and said they asked their teachers, and the teachers didn’t know.

I heard the world in their voices when they asked me. They expected me to know. They expected me to explain.

I have had to tell them before that there are things that I don’t know, like why we can’t understand whales and dolphins… All I could do was hold them while I cried.

If the message behind the act is so important, so symbolic, so clear and pure, how did I miss it?

Can it be even more tragic that it was all for nothing, because I still don’t get it, so how many others don’t either?

Was it worth it?

Certainly not to the people of Oklahoma City.

Audrae Arndt is a senior in English at Iowa State University.