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Atonement: An Epilogue to Osama bin Laden
Posted May 07, 2011 at 01:00am by Ashley

I still remember where I was on September 11, 2001, the infamous day of terror in the United States that "changed everything".

It was supposed to be any other Tuesday, with my mother washing her hair and getting ready to go to her job downtown, my father doing whatever he did on his computer back in those days before driving us to work and school, and myself getting ready for another average day at school in the third grade. There was nothing seemingly noteworthy about the day for the first few minutes of that morning, save for the fact that the weather was unusually nice for a mid-September day in Milwaukee.

Of course, as you and just about every other person on this Earth know all too well, it wouldn't end up being just another ho-hum day in the middle of September, for the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Virginia were attacked with airliners hijacked as part of a co-ordinated terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda (or, roughly, "The Base"), a fundamentalist group in the Middle East that became a household name in the United States and abroad just as soon as the closest thing to a face to all the madness released a tape proudly claiming responsibility for unleashing it all.

That man, of course, was Osama bin Laden, the wealthy and charismatic progeny of an extremely influential Saudi Arabian oil family that - to the well-publicized chagrin and outright condemnation and disownment of other relatively notable members of his family - used said power and privilege to build up a hegemonic web of extremism across the Middle East, hell-bent on destroying anyone who stood in the way of his fundamentalist dogma, be it a stereotypical American, a Buddhist in Asia, or any of the virtually unanimous majority of Muslims anywhere who stood opposed to his brand of Islam.

To some who were particularly tuned in to geopolitics, like my father, he was already a supporting member of a cast of enemies of the United States for prior acts like 2000's bombing of the USS Cole, taking his place alongside people the United States had to keep a special eye on until he was thrust above them all on that fateful day.

To just about everyone else, like my eight-year old self, he was a scary new face, bringing frightening words like "jihad" straight to the kitchen table. This man was a real-life movie villain, the media and the government and pretty much bin Laden himself told us. We were all the rotten scum of the universe to this man, and he wanted us all dead for nothing more than the simple "sin" of disagreeing with his hateful beliefs.

Within a month's time, the effect of September 11 became more than just an unimaginably horrific and unspeakable act of terrorism on American soil, as a staggering wave of nationalism took the country by storm at levels perhaps not seen since the return of American hostages in Iran moments after Ronald Reagan's inauguration as President in 1981, or when radios across the land proclaimed the war in Europe to be over after Nazi Germany's surrender at the end of World War II.

Flags flew everywhere, from houses to schools and parks and bars and sports stadiums. President George W. Bush's approval rating shot up to an all-time high recorded for any sitting President of 92%, and the USA PATRIOT Act was passed by a 98-1 vote in the United States Senate, paving the way for a never-before-seen redefinition of the word "freedom" by the very same government that purported itself to be going after this evil man with a sudden military offensive in Al-Qaeda's apparently "home" in Afghanistan, to defend that "freedom" that we so cherished.

I often consider a benchmark of just how far-reaching this nationalism was to be the effect that it managed to have on my own family, a group of pacifist liberals and ardent Democrats that would sooner plunge into the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench and never surface again than vote for or support anything coming within a ten-mile radius of the word "conservative". If my family - the same ones that actively campaigned for Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis back in the 1980s - was caught up in the wave of flag-raising and "USA!" chanting and hyperbolic threats to "smoke terrorists out of caves", I reckoned, then surely anyone more prone to nationalistic tendencies than us would be as inclined to act the same way.

As time began to pile up since that horrible day, my family's optimism about swift retribution for acts against our native country began to wane. The flags steadily decreased in preponderance as Osama remained free and drifting somewhere in the Middle East in an area reckoned by some analysts to stretch anywhere from Syria to Pakistan, taunting us with a slew of new tapes about our perceived incompetence in catching him, boasting about his aloof state as the Bush Administration led us into another war in Iraq and continued on with their reams of restrictions to and amendments on that concept known as "freedom", all supposedly in the name of catching that seemingly uncatchable man.

Eventually, the war in Iraq, President Bush's hilariously high unpopularity (his approval rating bottoming out at an all-time low of 19% in 2008, giving him the dubious distinction of simultaneously holding the records for highest and lowest approval ratings for a sitting President), and a tanking American economy became the concerns of the moment, relegating the man who had branded himself into many a mind as an embodiment of evil to fodder for small-talk about government incompetence, always in the vein of "So, where's Osama?", or as a remark on the Bush Administration's self-congratulatory attitude towards their handling of terrorism, despite their inability of winning a manhunt they'd started eight years prior to leaving the White House.

Osama was no longer the target of a unified American style of patriotic rage against his very being, but merely a poster-boy for unfinished business.

And yet, despite all of the aforementioned bad things and other circumstances that pushed ahead of Osama to become bigger worries and targets of anger, he remained somewhere in the back of countless minds.

I would venture to say, based on my own memories and that of others near my age that I've talked to, that he held a particularly infamous place in the back of someone in my generation's mind, as he was a villain for us children in a way not unlike someone of Adolf Hitler's ilk for children growing up during those reigns of terror. (As one commentator put it: "They had our first terrorist attack before their first kiss.") While our parents were all old enough to remember the dog days of Fidel Castro, Qaddafi's first go-around, or Milosevic, we were introduced to Bin Laden as our first villain, and with something decidedly worse than devious acts on someone else's non-American soil.

It is because of this compelling grasp he had on the impressionable mind of a young child such as myself's perception of an uncertain world around them, I'd say, that led me to react to the news of his shooting at the hands of American military forces with a sense that could be described as nothing less than unbridled euphoria.

It had finally happened, my father informed me on an uneventful night of May 1st, as he walked over to my computer to tell me of the news. Within minutes of turning on the television to the sight of current President Barack Obama confirming that Osama had indeed been killed by gunfire at a compound in Abottabad, Pakistan, my family was in a state of nationalistic jubilation unlike any I'd ever seen from them.

Far from the optimistic-yet-mournful flag-waving hysteria we'd been caught up in post-9/11 that seemed like it had been ripped straight out of a Toby Keith song, this was a mood of celebration, a sort of recognition of the fact that the United States had done something worth chanting "USA!" on the White House lawn for in an incredibly long time. My father's usual disavowal of nationalism once again served as a benchmark for me of how widespread this good feeling was, as this was the first (and, perhaps, when everything is said and done, the only) time I'd ever seen him express sheer joy at the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner.

And, you know what? I was damn happy, too. I'm not naïve, and I don't subscribe to the notion that the killing of Osama at long last solves all of our nation's ills. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that very few others do, if any. I'm aware that by now, Osama was a largely deprecated figurehead for a largely deprecated organization, and that his killing didn't do much more than provide a rallying point for people and send a litany of symbolic messages to friend and foe alike.

I do know, like everyone else, that our economy remains in a state that could be charitably described as "shambles", and that we are plagued by a variety of ills real and imagined both at home and abroad that did not dissipate in light of this killing.

However, I also know that this man was a supreme arbiter of hate against me, my family, my friends, and practically everyone who didn't subscribe to a narrow stream of rigidly defined beliefs. This man wanted me and those around me - those people that I'd described as "pacifist liberals", who saw the good out of anyone and anything, to a point nearing a practical fault - dead, and to that end, financed the most horrific and deadly terrorist attacks in the history of a country that has seen its share of bloody events.

I knew that this was the same man who ushered in a state of fear and paranoia in a country that had previously made a point of rising above such feelings, and instilled a sense of skepticism towards the motives and goals of anyone and anything in me that continues to this day.

It is because of that, I believe, that I joined in the celebration of Osama's death. I saw it as a sort of atonement for the plethora of ill will and destruction this wicked man cast upon this weary world, however little that atonement may actually do for those killed in the name of "jihad", those killed in the name of fighting this man's army of hate, or the problems that this same weary world continues to face going forward.

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