You and I felt it Sunday night. For that split second in time, when the cool voice of President Obama pronounced those words, we found ourselves in a profound moment of disbelief. Usama bin Laden — dead. Staying up late, we watched the streets of Times Square in New York and in front of the White House erupt in jubilance at the announcement of bin Laden’s death at the hands of the United States military’s special ops team, the Navy SEALs. As we watched, there was a strange feeling of having been excised of a very large malignancy on our nation’s psyche — one we have been living with for so long that it had become part of our cultural expression.
I’m not sure if I know what else to feel at the news of bin Laden’s death, except maybe sensing his removal from the planet as an amputee experiences a ghost limb. If you were like me, and you remembered the same kind of jubilation and dancing on the streets ten years ago in an unnamed Islamic country — a celebration (real or not) of the downing of the World Trade Center in New York — you probably experienced true visceral recoil watching those celebrations in New York and Washington. We see into the young faces of those celebrants caught in a screen shot by Eric posted above. The dancing in the streets and the waving of flags to some of those young people meant that the boogeyman Usama bin Laden — a real Freddie Kruger from a real “Nightmare on Elm Street” — was finally no more. It looked unconscious to me. College students partying for the purpose of blowing off steam from finals.
The young people celebrating could not have been more than ten years old at the time the Twin Towers fell. From children’s eyes, September 11, 2001 meant losing the perception of a safe and secure world. They were, at the time, not schooled in the history of the 1960s, nor the hard-fought struggles against political hegemons like Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or for that matter George Bush I, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. In those faces, you recognize the children they were and the parables their parents used to caricature and characterize an enemy, a national wound, and a disaster that told all Americans that their isolated empire was no longer sacrosanct.
There has been more than too much water under that bridge we crossed after September 11, 2001. Tora Bora. WMDs. the Iraq invasion. Shock and Awe. Six thousand US casualties and thousands more from the international coalition of US allies, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The Patriot Act. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. Extraordinary rendition. The signing away of Habeus Corpus. That odd feeling in the pit of our stomachs tells us something: we have to know, now that the boogeyman is gone, what we have really lost. We need to take time to soak in what became of us over the last ten years. We were lied to. We placed ourselves in a position where we could not do anything but be victimized by savior-redeemers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When we did we were belittled as unpatriotic cowards. Libtards. Traitors.
Outside of a few well-connected and profitable ventures stemming from military involvement in the Iraq War, everyone else paid the price for exacting revenge upon ‘the other’ — he who exacted his own form of justice against the Western empire, which in turn at once coddled and betrayed him. That includes to this day steadfast Americans victimized because they practiced his same faith. Now we look at the mirror of who we were and we see ourselves as another monster, our own nightmare, only this time on Main Street — reflected back. We are divided from each other by that looking glass.
It is no wonder then that we do recoil at the site of a ‘post-bin Laden’ celebration, and maybe rightfully, feel sick to our stomachs. What is this party really for? The children we saw partying may have unconsciously been reared under a lie. Yet we can’t really judge the revelers of May 1st, 2011. That I think, only furthers the divide between us and what we see in the mirror, and to do so would not honor all that was lost over the last ten years, not the least of which was our humanity.
I cannot offer any specific advice on how we can or should deal with a ‘post-bin Laden’ world. It still is and has always been a dangerous place. No one monster’s death can end that. But maybe as the wounded, we could begin healing ourselves of having been victimized by lies through helping others through their own post-9-11 trauma, including the very children you see in Eric’s screen shot. The wound to their innocence still has a chance of being healed. They have a chance to learn where monsters — our dark sides — come from if we’re willing to teach them.
As learned from other nations who have coped with living during wartime, if anything is to come from truly defeating an enemy it must include the opportunity for our children and children everywhere to celebrate and enjoy the world, its people and its wonders with a sense of wise innocence. The responsibility falls on us then, as the guardians who have been around the fog of war too many times, to stay alert and put emphasis on the “wise.”
“Perhaps the right answers aren’t far behind” I hope you are right, Jude. How I hope.
As I mentioned on Political Waves on Monday, unless we are able to tie bin Laden and the whole of this issue of terrorism back to our geopolitical posturing in someone else’s country, we miss Cause. This is the karma of empire. Even as our astrology urges us to “know thyself,” we still don’t make this connection … and still don’t know ourselves through the eyes of other than ‘American interests.’
As for military and young ones, my concern is that joining up is becoming more and more attractive as jobs disappear. This has long been a career path for those without means for education: Lynndie England and the debacle at Abu Ghraib is a glaring example of why and how that often works out badly.
The upside is that the energy signature is still urging us to “know theyself” and we’re seeing a very different response now than the one in the early years of the century. At least now we’re asking the right questions, which is always key to change. Perhaps the right answers aren’t far behind.
Personally, I think it’s a bizarre confluence of events that younger people should be so gratified that OBL has been killed and the anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Of course, these kids really don’t remember a time when they would be considered the enemy. By their own government.
Maybe evil is in the eye of the beholder…
at our uni students get “free” access to the ny times, and tho i hardly see anyone actually reading it, in my last multicultural ed class yesterday someone brought in a copy and asked what i thought about this, to which i asked the same of him sparking a conversation with a few others. am happy to report that for one, they are asking questions and for two, they are critical and skeptical about the whole situation and what they’re being fed. after showing them at least 3 films on critical media literacy and getting the reaction that i (and those critiquing media) were being “too sensitive”, this felt like a breakthrough.
Brendan:
This is where the gaps in the current development of this country are. Over the last ten years, we have not fully developed ourselves as a society with room for evolution and knowledge. One side of the country reveres knowledge while another fears it.
Instead, now we have a class system and a plutocracy. We were lied to and robbed of a future. Now there are too many people in penal institutions and the military. That’s the other under-reported part of the misspent years since 9-11.
Today, I did hear some interviews from college age kids after the partying on NPR. Most expressed remorse about their over-the top celebration of OBL’s death. Many came to realize that there could be repercussions over their public reaction as we made of the street demonstrations from a Muslim city in support of 9-11 which was shown us again and again after the incident — real or staged, the display of those incidents had an effect and were used to build up hatred.
I was heartened to hear what these kids said. They were awake.
Fe – No argument here!
What is sad is that many kids here feel that the only way to get out of the county is to join up. There are so few real, well paying jobs anywhere around here that enlisting can seem the only thing to do for a good number. There is a “but” here: more than a few can’t qualify to enlist, so even that avenue can be cut off. It’s easier for them to get into the local community college but then they have to figure out how to pay for it, which for many is an impossible goal.
Here in Bisbee I believe the biggest employer is the county gov’t, next is the Border Patrol, and then the service industries. There simply ain’t much else. The biggest employer in the county is the Army: Fort Huachuca is only 30 miles away, with over 10,000 soldiers on base and growing. The town of Sierra Vista, just outside and surrounding the fort, is the biggest city in the entire county with 35,000 residents, most of whom are ex-Army, work for the Army, or sell to the Army and themselves. I go there to shop, only because Bisbee itself has very little retail. I dislike it otherwise.
Granted, these are younger folk, high school, not university age. They’ve lived under the shadow of 9/11 for a greater proportion of their lives, so I feel they know even less of what it means to not be at ‘war.’ This war isn’t like the Vietnam War of my youth, we tended to have very strong opinions about it, but these kids seem to accept that war is the natural state of affairs.
That’s a perception that we really have to work at turning around.
Brendan:
That is exactly the point. The Lie has been so huge that its been socialized into American life. This needs to be examined and discussed as a means to change the path of that awful, ineluctable river we’ve been through these last ten years.
No lie, Fe. What next for the younger generations, and us?
Oddly, the kids here don’t seem all that excited by OBL’s death, instead they are mostly curious about what I know of it, is such and such true, and so on. No spontaneous flags, no high fives, seemingly no connection to them. I won’t say oblivious, they do know it happened, but they are just not concerned all that much. Not even the young man I know who begins Army boot camp in July seems to have a reaction.
Granted, these are younger folk, high school, not university age. They’ve lived under the shadow of 9/11 for a greater proportion of their lives, so I feel they know even less of what it means to not be at ‘war.’ This war isn’t like the Vietnam War of my youth, we tended to have very strong opinions about it, but these kids seem to accept that war is the natural state of affairs.
That’s a perception that we really have to work at turning around.
Hear, hear, my sisters, hear, hear. (Or, is it: here, here? About the same, right now, I guess.)
Amanda:
I did too.
I feel like we’ve become distorted having lived through decades of lies and it appears ready to pervade over the coming generations. I keep hoping we don’t end up reducing the experience we’ve been through to a Wii game.
How we got there is going to be an important teaching across the board.
thanks, Fe.
along these lines, the thought that came to my mind when i saw the photo of the revelers with mouths wide open — whether they are actually young or not — was, “these people are actually asking to be fed more lies.”
that is the steady diet they/we have known, hand-fed by the parental government/big brother. a whole population who has not been shown how to forage on their own, is completely dependent on “infotainment,” and is actually begging for more.
i shuddered when i saw that screen shot.