Bin Laden Dead, The View From New York

A Day-After Note: I wrote this to try to explain my weird sense of hesitation to celebrate and partake in a moment of morbid glee and relief. I am happy but only to the extent that I hope some very tired soldiers get to go home now, that would be great. I am happy that so many people feel so much better now and that they feel close to their neighbors and country again. As for the rest, the incredible asymmetry of a world released from a single individual's grip leaves me feeling off balance. Like Hitler, the world is improved without him, but I worry about the momentum of violence with or without its initial push still around. So, I hope that this is one of those violent punctuation marks that precedes a passage of calm and not just some afterthought asterisk extending what we all celebrated being done with.

Original Post:

So. Osama bin Laden is dead. It happened just now. And then it happened again. And then again and again every time each person had something to say on those constantly updating social media streams.

When I first heard the news, probably the x millionth time the news had been heard tonight, I felt sympathy for someone I can't quite identify. It was a little bit for him, poor, sick bastard. And it was a little bit for whoever it was that did it, that shot him in the head, just that one time but so many more with each retelling. And it was a little bit for the lungs that had been holding some sort of long-forgotten breath, the wince before the “this will only hurt a bit.” We emotionally feel what we will soon physically feel, and we brace ourselves as if it will somehow stop it all. It never does, right?

At the end of this, we will have a body and I imagine a few medals, a few ceremonies, a few words. It’s nighttime in New York and an entirely different day where he was; the separation like the swift inhale, the moment of constrained panic before the pressure, the force, the hurt that we wait to confront with tensed faces.

So. Osama bin Laden is dead. Remember that day in school, in a classroom in Ohio? We were all arguing about going to war, about weapons, about mass destruction—it was like we were tired of holding our breath, ever since that first moment we heard the name Osama bin Laden we had been waiting, tense faces ready for the impact and it just never fucking came. So we went looking.

I was so upset then. I was so indignant, in knee socks and braids and on my way to field hockey.

And then tonight when I heard the news, when I imagined the sentence “he was shot in the head” in motion, I thought about that person I was not that long ago. In some dumb way, some unhelpful, some weightless way, the name Osama bin Laden was something I felt back then, somewhere in between my gut and my head. It was a name unhinged from its owner, thrown into a world that had no use for it. And now? I suppose I am glad to be rid of the name, I imagine it released from the speeches and arguments and, opposite the flow of those constantly updating social media streams, finding its way back to its owner, its reflection following silently one pace behind as it crosses the ocean again. They said he won’t be buried, but they found him a place at sea. All he has now is a string of letters returned to his body and a bullet in his head.

I asked my mother how she felt about it all and she said, “How Santa feels about you.” One Christmas growing up—growing up Jewish I might add—my father was responsible for writing the “from Santa” notes on the wrapped gifts. For a through and through, Cleveland-bred, American Jew, he performed the role admirably. But for me, he wrote, “from Santa, whose feelings for you are conflicted but who feels obligated to get you this gift.”

This is an imperfect way of me saying, I know that this means something, that his death marks some moment in some process for someone somewhere…I just don’t know for whom. In a confusion of geography, in a knot of information flows, an actor made a mess of space and boundaries, tying a whole nation to a series of moving dots plotted over an unfamiliar map. In an instant, the strings are cut, space feels less compressed and we’re all looking around thinking, “yeah right, this will only hurt a bit?”