Say Anything | Ding, dong, the witch is dead

If you live in the land of no internet, you might not know that Osama bin Laden is dead.

You may have missed the near-instantaneous update of his Wikipedia page alerting the masses to his death, or the astronomical rise in membership in the newly-created “Osama bin Laden is Dead” Facebook group which, for quite a while there, gained a thousand members or so every ten seconds. You wouldn’t have been able to check out the informative IsOsamaDead.com, the rapid-fire status updates, the incessant tweeting.

Even from beyond the grave, Osama bin Laden made the internet explode.

But enough about him. We’re college students. One thing we do better than almost anyone else on Earth is make things all about us.

Apparently, we are a pretty special lot. We’re the “post-9/11 generation,” citizens who have spent half our lives under the shadow of bin Laden’s terror. Most people hit puberty; current undergrads slammed into it as though propelled by some violent force. And, well, I guess we were.

For me, Sept. 11 was the second day of seventh grade. Terrorism, a word I’d never heard before, slipped into the vernacular. I didn’t know what it meant but I said it all the time. It made me feel important and secure.

My classmates and I spoke of little else. A girl who knew no one affected by the attacks took to sobbing in the hallway during lunch, a patriotic plea for attention. News of people we knew, or knew of, relatives and friends and friends of friends, of just-missed trains and coffee stops that serendipitously saved lives, littered the halls like black confetti. You couldn’t move two steps without a piece falling in your hair. In a strange, teenage way, I kind of wanted a story to tell so I didn’t feel left out.

Now the mass murderer behind the attacks is dead, killed by U.S. forces in a firestorm in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There is singing in the streets. Every now and then, it seems, the world is a just place.

But what does this mean, besides the fact that Kate and Will have officially lost their monopoly on the news cycle? Do we even know for certain that bin Laden is dead? Perhaps we should wait on our celebrations until Donald Trump can verify that he has seen Osama’s death certificate.

I am wondering what the death of bin Laden does, practically speaking, besides make us feel incredibly good. Does this deliver a fatal blow to al Qaeda? Or is terrorism one of those Hydra-like entities — cut off one head, and two more grow in its place? While there are plenty of flesh-and-blood terrorists out there to kill, what we’re really waging war on is an intangible thing. As long as the emotions behind terrorism persist — as long as there is hate and fear and rage among us — those urges can manifest in violence.

Our children will grow up in a post-9/11 world, too. Bin Laden, I am afraid, is the kind of person who is never really gone.

There is another side to that truth, though, and it is that is each of those sentiments has a far more powerful opposite. I think we can be valiant when we want to be; we can stay calm in crisis. And if last night is any indication, justice can be done.

It might take a while. This time around, it took almost 10 years. But maybe one day we won’t call ourselves the post-9/11 generation anymore. Maybe we will be defined by what we’ve done, not by what has been done to us.

Maybe we will tell our kids what terrorism was, not what it is.

Jessica Goldstein is a College senior from Berkeley Heights, N.J. Her email address is goldstein@theDP.com.

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