Osama

This morning, Monday, May 2, 2011, at around 5:45 a.m., while walking my dog, Penny through the quiet beginning of another week here in Northampton, Massachusetts, I passed a collection of colorful newspaper stands. My eyes caught sight of the headlines like an ignorantly eager fish might bite bait and a hook. "Osama bin Laden Killed by U.S." I read. 


I was a senior in high school when the country was attacked by al Qaida's traveling terrorists. That fall, my class's senior trip to Florida was cancelled, but not without a fight. We had an evening assembly. Passionate parents fought to keep the school trip. "We can't let the terrorist win!" I remember one mother saying in a sudden soliloquy. My mother and I sat in the back of the auditorium, leaning into one another, listening and keeping our comments to ourselves. "This is what they want! They want us to be afraid!" A father declared and a few people clapped in support, nodding their heads and saying things like, "He's right, you know, he's exactly right."  It was an awkward assembly (for no seventeen-year-old wants to be present when his/her parent is anything but silent and invisible). I remember my mother mumbling, "I'm not about to sacrifice my child to make a point." Logan International Airport had not yet regained her trust. That Spring, this same group of proactive parents organized and chaperoned the trip to Florida and I went. By then, my mother and father had decided that a quick trip to Disney World wouldn't, most likely, kill me.  


On September 11, 2001, I sat in the lunch room listening to incomplete and unintelligible stories as they spread around me like haze. Everyone leaned over their uneaten sandwiches. "Twin Towers," I heard. "Flew out of Logan," "New York City," "Pentagon" and "it was terrorists, terrorists hijacked the planes." I was nervous, uninformed. I didn't know where the Twin Towers were and I feared they might be in Boston. My father worked in Boston at the time. I didn't know where his office was in Boston, but I assumed it could be within the walls of one of these burning buildings everyone was whispering about. 


After lunch, in classrooms throughout the school, televisions and computers were turned on and tuned in. In smokey New York City streets, debris fell from the sky like dirty snow. Firefighters ran hoses. Police ran for survivors. Business men and woman ran around in heels and dark suits with faces distorted by horror and muddied by soot. Bodies fell from the sky. We watched bodies fall from the sky and planes crash into the New York City skyline. 


That night, President George W. Bush spoke on national television. "That poor bastard," I remember my mother murmuring when his sullen face appeared on the screen. For the following months, we watched the nightly news, wincing and choking up at the personal stories that began to play. Strangers stood before camera crews showing pictures of lost loved ones and crumpled tissues between their fingers as they rose them to their wet eyes. We watched footage of plastered walls of Missing Person papers in New York City bus stops and downtown subway stations. I remember when they stopped calling the work at Ground Zero, a rescue mission. I watched people in foreign city streets celebrate the attacks of September 11th. Dancing, parading and howling, these people publicly hailed the mass murdering martyrs. America, I learned in that moment, was like the rich, perfect, popular kid who one day got ambushed, defecated on, shoved into a locker and left over night to weep within darkness.  


I must admit that I do believe the murder of Osama bin Laden was extremely justified, however it is a peculiar, guilty joy or satisfaction that stems from the death of this person, even someone as corrupt and blatantly evil as he. Sunday night, after President Barack Obama announced the news, there were celebratory riots and prayer vigils across the country, particularly outside the White House and in New York City.  Across America, many people are smiling and sighing that justice has finally been served, but there are also many Americans shaking their heads and fingers, saying, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind! and quotes by the renowned American pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr.  I can't say what I believe is right. My husband, Scott is disgusted by the excitement. This morning, while I made my bagged lunch, I compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler. He can't be alive, I said simply. He just shouldn't be alive. Of course, really, I don't know. Perhaps a formal trial would be interesting and just, but what possible sentence does one deserve for the massacre of thousands of innocent people? I know what my friend, Mark would say without even asking him. As I have written before, here, in an entry titled "Eye for an Eye", Mark would say that Osama bin Laden deserves to get what he did to others. He deserves to be raised high above a cement city street, to the height of the 110th floor of the Twin Towers, and thrown onto a burning ledge. He should be forced to choose between fire and a fall, a death by burning or a death by plummeting into the windy expanse of a fourteen hundred foot drop. 


Lucky for him, the Eighth Amendment of The United States Constitution would prevent such cruel and unusual punishment. However, no matter how he died, he is dead and whether you speculate, criticize or commend the actions of the United States in the raid and killing of this extremely powerful terrorist, all we can really do now is hope that Osama bin Laden does not escape Hell and hide in some hidden compound in Heaven.