Osama bin Laden’s death comes at a complicated moment. Our national neuroses were threatening to overwhelm us. We were squabbling and sorry. I don’t know that we should be proud of the past few years.
But now bin Laden is dead, and now the most prominent national feeling is a sort of contemplative joy — not so much joy at the death of bin Laden, but joy because justice has come.
The outpouring of emotion, I think, is surprising. We’d almost gotten over patriotism, at least the ostentatious kind, and so it was strange to feel it well up again across the country, as if bin Laden had a greater hold on us than we thought.
It’s worth noting that some of the emotion comes because for our generation, it’s harder and harder to remember a day before bin Laden. For many of us that was our first day in the adult world, and it came sooner than we’ve recognized. We grew up with 9/11 as a constant companion, and I don’t think we realized until Sunday how much we lived in its shadow.
It does say something about this nation that we are still rich with people who work in the quiet and in the margins and without acclaim; people who were mocked for their inability to find bin Laden day after day and went to work anyway; people who found him in the end, because it was their job to find him.
That way of thinking started with former President George W. Bush, who said we would not falter or fail until justice was done, and Sunday was his day too.
We are certainly, blessedly, rich in the brave soldiers who we will no doubt meet soon, the ones who rode in after bin Laden, with a prayer on their lips, perhaps, or with a whispered, “Let’s roll.”
And it says something about President Barack Obama that he never exploded — “Stop with the birth certificate! I’m chasing bin Laden, what are you doing?”
After the announcement, a friend said he should have grabbed a bullhorn and yelled to the crowd as it gathered and cheered. He could have.
This should be a reminder, if for an instant we could have forgotten, that the presidency is not a joke — never a joke — and should not be sought after lightly or for personal gain.
We began last week talking about Donald Trump, and look how the week ended.
In the coming weeks, Pakistan’s role will raise questions. To think bin Laden was in a mansion, and not a cave, and that we sent $1 billion per year to Pakistan to hunt for him — there are probably tense calls from there to the White House this week, and the conversations will continue to be tense.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the prolonged grapple with terror goes on.
Bin Laden’s death makes us safer in the long run, yes, but for tomorrow and the next days the world is a more dangerous place than it was on Sunday. The same people who worked to find bin Laden woke up this morning and went back to work, and so did people who hate us.
The death of bin Laden could easily be taken for a fitting coda to these long 10 years of 9/11.
But memory doesn’t work that way. Nothing ended Sunday for those who lost loved ones, no curtain dropped on an era, no neat line divides Sunday, May 1, from the last day of April. Nothing really changed.
And if, as Obama said, we remember September 11 as a series of images seared into our minds, nothing that happened Sunday will erase them.
But now there are these images too: They were singing at Ground Zero in New York and they were cheering outside the White House, and for one moment on earth there was justice.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
