It has been over a week now since the announcement that America killed Osama Bin Laden. Not much has changed in my day to day life, though my perception of the generation I am grouped with has been shifted powerfully. I may be the only one, but I feel less safe than I did last Sunday.
I remember September 11, 2001 just like all my peers. I remember sitting in 8th grade Social Studies and hearing whispers of a plane crash in New York, I remember watching the the second plane hit the towers, and I remember the prayer service we held at church that evening. The lines as the gas stations, the images being played over and over again, teachers crying, people enlisting, and I was in choir when the name Bin Laden was first linked to the attacks. I remember it all too.
I also remember the outrage that people felt when they saw citizens of other countries celebrating in the streets, when people seemed to first realize that there are people in this world that hate them because they are Americans. I never felt that outraged; I sat through history classes, I had read books, I knew America did some pretty shady stuff that I was not down with. So, while I did not condone the celebrations it made sense to me. Or maybe it was because I could hear my mother saying something like, "America, a nation built though the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another..."
It was the first time since Pearl Harbor (I think, I don't know, I'm not a scholar...) American felt what it was to be attacked on their land. Think about that. How many other places in the world have that luxury? Where else are people so privileged. And it is a privilege, not a right; if America thought it was a right we would stop attacking other people's home and businesses and schools, we would stop killing peoples children and parents. How often do you thank your god that you live in place where you don't have to fear attack on a daily bases? Even at age 13 I though going to war with "terror" and Iraq was an awful idea. And back then that was not a cool opinion to hold.
So now that the mood has shifted and the year is 2011 and not 2001, America has killed Osama Bin Laden, and my generation is out in the streets celebrating, celebrating death! They are in the streets celebrating death, and it makes me want to weep. Have they forgotten what it feels like to have someone celebrate the death of Americans? Or do they discount the lives of Bin Laden's children and grandchildren? Do they just feel so certain that God's moral judgment is on their side that it is the right thing to do? Are they that certain that we aren't the bad guys? Well that sounds like a terrorist group to me. But who am I to say.
Maybe I don't get it because I was never scared. I was never scared to fly after 9/11. I didn't feel that people who looked different that me deserved to be treated differently when going though security. I didn't feel the need to stock pile food, or go out and buy an American flag for every room in my house. And I certainly never thought war was going to solve any of our problems.
I actually feel less safe now that Bin Laden is dead. I see that the ending of his life did not take the hatred and poison out of the world but only intensified it. It opened up the hatred it had planted in the hearts of young Americans ten years ago. We are just the same as him, and no one sees it.
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