John Delach

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe versus Wade on January 22, 1973 forced me to announce to my friends and family that I couldn’t accept abortions performed for convenience. Of course, I realized how unpopular my belief was so I explained to that this was my belief, and I would never try to stop someone from having an abortion. I simply ask others to accept my beliefs the same way as I accept theirs.

I also explained that rather than engage in discussions about abortions, I would avoid each and every one of these debates as they can be too emotional. In return, I would take on reporting the daily weather information from The New York Times. For any readers out there unfamiliar with the Times daily weather report, it is quite comprehensive.

My particular task would be to monitor the paper’s daily measure of our rainfall for the last 30 days and for the last year. I assumed responsibility to monitor shortfalls and report possible droughts.

Fortunately,  everybody accepted my wacky solution and so ended further debates of pro-life versus pro-choice.

Once I committed myself to belief in the right to life, I came to understand that I had to come to terms with death in combat and public executions. War turned out to be too big and too complicated to wrap my mind around and I finally decided to remove it from my consideration. I will admit that if I was forced to choose, I would lean on the side of becoming a conscientious objector, but I will never know if I would have had the courage of this conviction if push came to shove.

I also had a hard time coming to a meaningful conclusion for absolute prohibition of capital punishment. My problem was that to be meaningful, such a prohibition would have to include those who are so evil that to let them live would be repulsive. Thankfully, we rarely encounter people who are this vile and my epiphany didn’t arrive until Timothy J. McVey destroyed the Alfred P. Mirrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

April 19^th was a Wednesday and Mc Vey detonated his eight-hundred-pound ammonium nitrate / fuel oil bomb that he hid in  the cargo compartment of a rented Ryder truck that he had parked outside the north entrance to the building. The massive explosion destroyed the entire facade of the eight-story building and about a third of the interior killing 168 people including 19 children, most of them in a nursery pre-school located on the first floor.

McVey said this about his victims:

             To these people in Oklahoma who lost a loved one, I’m

             sorry but it happens every day. You’re not the first mother

             to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or

             a granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the

             world. I’m not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a

             fetal ball and cry just because the victims want me to do that.                  

.

In other words, His victims were merely collateral damage.

Of the children he had killed, McVey remarked: “I thought it was terrible that there were children in the building.”

Mc Vey was charged and convicted for killing eight federal agents who were on active duty that day. The penalty for killing each one of them was clearly death. Mc Vey was transferred to the federal death row at USP Terre Haute in Indiana where he was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

If you can, find the iconic photo by Charle Porter of a fireman gently cradling the body of a one-year-old child fatally wounded by Mc Veigh’s bomb. It sums up the results of Mc Vey’s despicable attack.   

Well, there you have it. I took a long time to straighten out my feelings and to make peace with my beliefs. Finally, I realized that my belief for life must prevail, even for Timothy Mc Vey. That photo will haunt me until the day I die,

Still, I choose to belief in life, so help me God.