A MOMENT OF SILENCE

Sometimes talk is healing. sometimes silence works better. So at 9:02 a.m. on Wednesday, exactly one week from the moment of the explosion that tore apart hundreds of lives, Oklahoma City came to another halt. Gathered at what used to be the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, rescue teams briefly stopped picking through the wreckage and stood in quiet reflection. All over the city people bowed their heads. Outside of town, traffic stopped along Interstate 40. Beyond, in towns and cities around the country, in churches and offices and in the White House, the same pause was observed. For one minute, the unspeakable was commemorated by the unspoken.

It's too soon to tell whether the Oklahoma City bombing will also be a transforming moment in our national life, one of those episodes that make us take stock of ourselves and what it means to be an American. It's already plain that the explosion did more than just remind us that terrorism happens. In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the '90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast. As for antigovernment sentiment, so long as Americans are fretful about Washington-for that matter, so long as Americans are Americans-it won't go away. How it's expressed, however, is now subject to reconsideration. Then there's the gun lobby, which only a few weeks ago was basking in its renewed clout in Congress. For a while at least, it's once more on the defensive. And if high passion itself becomes less fashionable, the reverberations may even extend to single-issue politics on topics like abortion.

In their attempt to fathom the bombers' motives, many Americans discovered just how deep the paranoia runs among a small minority of their countrymen. It was easy to laugh at the wackier notions, uttered by the most normal-looking people speaking in reasoned tones: Russian troops are hidden in salt mines under Detroit waiting for their orders, the U.N. has a secret plan to disarm the public with the help of L.A. gangs. What was less easy to dismiss were those Americans who realize Janet Reno is not a paid agent of Jewish Colombian drug lords but who nonetheless are so deeply alienated from their government that they view it as their enemy. Most are not violent people, and many of them have understandable grievances about feeling left behind in the economic competition of the 1990s.