we will never forget

BREAKING NEWS: Osama bin Laden is dead, reportedly shot in the head by special forces in Pakistan early this Sunday morning, May 1, 2011.

Source

I'm glued to my television as this news is reported, as there's a crowd of people standing in front of the White House draped in flags, chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!" and filling me with a sense of tentative "FUCK YES."

The events of 9/11 are forever pressed into my brain, vivid in detail and feeling and a sense that on that day the world as we knew it spun off onto a new course. I was two weeks into my first year of college - eighteen years old and naive about anything outside my suburban bubble of life; then one morning I turned the TV on to find the same images of destruction and terror on every channel and I knew, with a cold chill running through my bones, that life was just different. Even now, ten years later, we still don't know what it all means for our country and the people on this planet.

We continue to ask questions, we continue to wonder and search for answers and THIS, this for me is the most important thing. One of my biggest questions after 9/11 was WHY? WHY do we have to treat each other in such inhumane ways? What does the mass murder of so many innocent people ever accomplish? WHY? WHY? WHY? I'll never understand. But we should never stop trying and asking.

In that vein, I have a hard time feeling celebratory the death of someone (in large part because we have to idea what the long term security affect of this will be) but the major orchestrator of a mass murder has been killed and and in a sense brought part of this story to a close. Not the entire story of course, Al Qaeda still exists, but for the people directly affected by 9/11 this has to feel a bit like closure. I'm choosing to believe that this is why that crowd in front of the White House is there and continuing to grow and cheer and voice their pride in this country.

President Obama gave a perfect speech tonight (and apparently wrote it himself) and I thank him, his administration and the servicemen who risked their lives in this effort to keep us safe. God bless America.

In closing, a quote from Mark Twain:

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."