On Osama bin Laden's death

September 11th will always be seared into my memory as a day when our nation lost a little bit of its innocence. This sentiment is perhaps most vivid for those of us for whom this moment was also a coming of age. The attacks occurred on my second day as a freshman in high school, and marked in a very pronounced way the start of a sobering new stage in my life. I think we mostly agree looking back that compared to the decade that preceded it, the years after 9/11 saw a renewed patriotism and sense of solidarity, but that the attacks brought us together while fanning the flames of our fear and distrust of outsiders. In some ways, I actually do miss those days of a nation united by its shared outpouring of emotion - whether it was grief, fear or defiance. It gave us an identity. But I think the net effect, apparent after just a few months, was debasing rather than uplifting, with defiance supplanted by righteousness and grief evolving into wrath. The rash, unmeasured reaction to 9/11 took us to war in Iraq within two years - a decision that had no relation to the war on terror and whose disastrous prosecution continues to overstrain our military even today.

Now that the initial shock of hearing that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces has worn off, those of us who remember 9/11 this way might be left to contemplate the kinds of emotions on display among some of the celebrating crowds. The mostly young people who turned out to cheer bin Laden's death probably feel, as I do, that al-Queda's actions robbed us of our childhood insouciance, or at least precipitated its loss. I too feel relief that an ugly chapter in history has come to an end, if only symbolically. However, the ecstatic cries of "USA! USA!" in celebration of a death struck me as inappropriate, if not deranged. And as others have pointed out, their zeal for death bears a chilling resemblance to that of anti-American extremists' celebrations (complete with jingoistic banner waving and chanting) following 9/11 and other murders of American civilians in the Middle East.

via TalkingPoints Memo
Have we already forgotten the unmeasured, emotionally-charged foreign policy disasters of the past decade? David Sirota wrote a great piece today criticizing the untempered displays of joy and the media for condoning it:

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory -- he has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history -- the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

Our reaction to the news last night should be the kind often exhibited by victims’ families at a perpetrator’s lethal injection -- a reaction typically marked by both muted relief but also by sadness over the fact that the perpetrators’ innocent victims are gone forever, the fact that the perpetrator's death cannot change the past, and the fact that our world continues to produce such monstrous perpetrators in the first place.

When we lose the sadness part -- when all we do is happily scream "USA! USA! USA!” at news of yet more killing in a now unending back-and-forth war -- it’s a sign we may be inadvertently letting the monsters win.

We can all understand jubilation in victory but it would have been a little more human to see some solemnity in remembrance of those who lost their lives in this conflict.