May 1, 2011: I tucked my son into bed after a pleasant and uneventful Sunday evening. Soon afterward, the reports began pouring in about the death of Osama bin Laden and uneventful became, well, eventful! As my wife and son slept, the rest of the country sprang to life. Americans took to the streets in the middle of the night in an historic outpouring of spontaneous celebration, the likes of which my generation has never seen before. While watching this happen, I could only look toward the morning and ponder what I should tell my son, who was still in utero on that fateful September morning in 2001.
For the last 10 years, my boy has been busy living life in a post 9/11 world. He hasn't a clue what it was like just a few months before his birth, when the nation and the world stood still in shock and horror while the towers fell and innocents died. He has no memory of a time where passengers and non-passengers at airports could co-mingle safely in the departure lounge or the bar. As he goes about daily life at the tender age of 9, he doesn't yet comprehend the hole that has existed in the hearts and lives of all of us who are in essence victims of a violent crime, a crime that has left us scared, traumatized and unable to do anything but stand by frustrated while the perpetrator taunts us for years on worldwide television. Even though for the most part we've been able to pick up the pieces and carry on as normal as possible, the thought of our menacing enemy remaining at large and elusive has gnawed at us the whole time, making an event as distant as a decade ago seem like yesterday every day.
Since then we've been grasping at any opportunity to feel good about ourselves again and coming up short. We've been at war longer than at any other time in our history, waded through political scandals, natural and industrial disasters and economic collapse. And just when we're at the peak of our frustration to the point of picking on each other with unprecedented pettiness and silliness, something extraordinary happens that somehow, for at least a moment, brings us all back home. A collective feeling of gratification and closure blankets the country for the first time in a long while.
And something else has appeared that we haven't felt much lately: hope. More than any other factor that has clouded our optimism over the years, It was the dark elusiveness of our nemesis of nemeses that has fed a deep feeling of cynicism in our culture. Suddenly we get the feeling that if this can happen for us, what other thorns can be removed from our side? And for those of us who had ceased to hope for any audacity out of our president, it doesn't get more audacious than the gutsy call to authorize this mission. Not exactly low-hanging fruit for any commander in chief and certainly the one call, maybe the only one, that stands a chance to unite the country during such cynical times.
Is the threat gone? Of course not. Al Qaeda remains a force to be taken seriously and no one in the western world can truly rest at ease until the network is completely neutralized. But the face of 9/11 is at long last gone from our sight, never to return. Such a carriage of justice is a first for my generation, and my son's. Even he can appreciate something as big as that.
God bless America.