today

I had a couple of people ask me today, as a (former?) New Yorker, how I felt about Osama bin Laden’s death.

The Special Report came on during my nightly chat with J. He put me on speaker for Obama’s speech b/c I don’t own a TV and my internet went down this weekend, so I may not have heard the story until next morning. 

I’ve only received 3 pieces of news in my life that I literally could not believe. They were about the kinds of things that..just don’t happen (to me). Like your third grade friend getting killed in a car accident, or your college roommate announcing she was having a baby, or the Twin Towers collapsing. I was in social studies class when I heard the news (bit ironic), but I didn’t believe it. The day before, we’d gotten a lecture on researching things for ourselves instead of blindly believing everything we heard, so for a good 5 minutes, I actually thought this was a test. Denial at it’s best. We had a full day of school with regularly scheduled classes, although mostly we just sat around and talked. I tried calling my parents – my dad worked in Midtown and my mom worked in Downtown Manhattan. I was too shocked to be properly worried when I couldn’t get through to anybody (more defense mechanisms).  Fortunately, bridges were shut down soon after the attack, so my mom never made it out of Staten Island that morning. It took my dad about 6 hours to get home, but he too was perfectly OK. The Subway wasn’t running, and it took me a good 5 hours to get home from school. The wind had carried debris (they looked like sheets of paper floating through the sky – maybe they were?) all the way to Brooklyn. I saw the skyline from my bus ride on the bridge into Staten Island. Absurd plumes of smoke rose into the air, completely opaque, so I could almost convince myself the Towers were not gone, but simply obscured for the time being. That was the only time I ever cried about 9/11.

So. How does hearing about Osama’s death make me feel? Honest answer? I feel old. I can’t believe this all happened ten years ago. Ten years!! I bet you there’re teenagers out there who hadn’t heard of Osama until last night. It doesn’t seem possible. But yeah. I wish I could say I’m glad he’s dead, but gladness is not really the emotion I’m experiencing. I kind of wish he had been taken alive and tried in the States. Having him die in a desert thousands of miles away feels unsatisfactory and anticlimactic. He probably didn’t even see it coming. I’d rather he went through the ordeal of journeying to the USA and having to face the families of those he murdered. Meh. At the end of the day, if he truly was still a threat (directly or by being a symbol of , it’s good he’s gone. But I’m not feeling giddy over it..