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.