Back to Square One

At 10:18 PM on the night of Sunday May 1st, in this year of our Lord 2011, I received a text message from one of my former roommates. It read simply this, "Bin laden is dead."

At first I was just puzzled. "Well, that was weird," I thought, "It's probably just some joke that I don't understand, a reference to something foolish some athlete or celebrity said." For if bin Laden (I enjoyed that the text had perfectly inverted the capitalization, he had never been a stickler for details of that sort) truly was dead, this was an awfully strange way to break the news to me. Why so matter-of-fact? No exclamations of any sort, no elaborations, no "did you hear that...", and it wasn't as if we had been discussing the state of our government's search for the fugitive at any recent time.

All of this occurred in the span of a few moments. As another couple of seconds passed though, it seemed more and more plausible. I began to recall the dozens of times when my friend had burst out of his room (or into mine), eager to share some tidbit of news with the rest of us, for he was very nearly addicted to the internet, and one of the ways he seemed to justify this to himself was by reveling in knowing every little thing that happened 20 minutes before anyone else. "Well, I suppose I better check Yahoo! News then," I continued. And so I did, and I can bet you'll guess what I found. I rushed to the TV and turned it on to one of the networks. I sat there, mildly entranced, for the next 45 minutes or so.

Primarily what I was doing, was reflecting. The feelings of awe, horror, and unity that I had felt in the fall of 8th grade all came rushing back to me.

Partially, I felt a great sense of relief and disbelief. It was finally over. 9 and 2/3rds years later, it was finally over with, and just out of the great blue like that. I am a person who really needs closure, even if it's of a largely symbolic variety, for I fully recognize that this will not be the end of the struggles in the Mid-East, or even anywhere near it. Still, whenever I was reminded of bin Laden's continued at-large status, it would gnaw at me, and the longer it went on, the deeper that feeling would get. It was no longer an acute sensation, a sharp desire to catch the man, as it had been shortly after the attacks, for the specifics and the freshness of those feelings naturally began to fade, but it became more of an ache, a deep prolonged ache, that seemed less and less likely to ever be requited. My inner sense of justice had difficulty feeling at peace.

Last fall I wrote a post commemorating the five year anniversary of this blog and discussing my feelings as I thought about how different my life and my personal self were between when I began this site and my present state. It was a little bit startling to tell you truth, noting how much things had changed. The night of May 1st though spurred a vivid connection twice that length, and the feelings were even stranger, even stronger. The world was a completely different place. I was almost a completely different person. Had it really been that long?

A couple of tears rolled down my cheek, the result of about seven different emotions coalescing till I was a bit overwhelmed. A touch of happiness was involved, as my internal sense of fairness was finally assuaged, but I had no personal vendetta, and even if I did, I hope, and I believe, that I wouldn't ever cry tears of joy over someone's death, no matter how heinous the individual. Mostly it was shades of sadness.

Sadness over innocence lost, as I reminisced over my carefree trivial life as a 13 year old. As I remembered friends who meant nearly the world to me back then, whom I haven't spoken to in years, or who have faded to the periphery of my social circle. Sadness as I remembered with the greatest clarity in years the true mind-blowing nature of the atrocities of that day; so horrible that grown men began crying at school, and so shocking that a widespread fear for our own safety, nestled away in a random public school, in a medium sized town, in the middle of the nation, took root. Sadness as I recalled the incredible sense of unity bonding everyone in the country for the entire year following the tragedy, and inevitably compared it to the disgusting partisanry we've regressed to once more. What a squandered opportunity. And sadness as I recalled how quickly things went downhill in Washington afterward, whilst using the tragedy for leverage, rapidly leading to the situation we've been mired in for nearly a decade now in the Middle East.

The hunt for bin Laden began a year before I entered high school. It ended one year after I graduated college. That's how long it took. When the search started I was supremely ignorant, inexperienced, had minimal work ethic or focus, and thought the strive for popularity was of the utmost import. I probably couldn't have even told you what the difference between a Democrat and a Republican was. As I said before, I wasn't even remotely the same person, I almost entirely grew up in that interlude.

Six years before I'd send my first text, and six months before my first friend even owned a cell phone, I walked out of Mrs. Fox's 1st hour English class with my friend Zach. At approximately 8:25 AM CST on Tuesday Septemer 11th, 2001 we approached the locker we shared, where we met up with Will and Kevin, the usual passing time routine before I would head down to the basement for band. As we arrived, Will began eagerly, though certainly not urgently, "Did you see what happened on TV?" Yes Will will forever hold the distinction of being the first person to inform me of the attacks of 9/11. We replied in the negative, as Mrs. Fox had no reason to turn the TV on during class, while Will, who had science with Mr. Canfield 1st hour, said that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, one after another. Mr. Canfield had started crying. They thought it might be terrorists. Instantly, for some reason, the mention of a terrorist attack made my brain jump to some sort of South East Asian plot. I still can't account for that, and within the next few hours, when the news crews started tossing around the name "Osama" (or "Hosama" as I heard it), it kept throwing my mental image out of whack.

As Will began describing it, I thought it was more of an "aw shucks" tragedy, something akin to the Oklahoma City Bombing, or in my silly 8th grade mind, the plane crash that killed Aaliyah a few weeks before. Something truly horrible, yes, and that would be talked about for years, but not something that was going to flip the entire world on its head. Of course, Will couldn't have known the full import of the tragedy yet either, what 8th grader could ten minutes after the fact? And besides, it hadn't even stopped unfolding yet.

Naturally by the end of band second hour, and certainly by the time World Geography with Mrs. Speevack rolled around third hour, it had been made quite clear to all of us that this was a very very big deal. The TV's were on in almost every classroom that day as each new jolting tidbit of information came to light. It didn't matter what channel, every network and most of the cable stations were airing coverage. I'll never forget at home that night, flipping through every station to see nothing but images of the tragedy, or blue screens with text saying programming had been halted out of respect for the day's events. The one and only exception was the Disney Channel, which I'm assuming didn't want to stop or switch to news footage because it might freak out little kids even more to have that normalcy gone. That was one of the weirdest parts though, you couldn't escape even if you'd wanted to, you couldn't just turn on the TV and forget your problems, it was everywhere. Never had I seen a single event so completely and immediately impact every known media outlet.

By fourth hour, Algebra with Mr. Hager, kids started whispering that maybe school would be cancelled and we'd all get to go home. Hager overheard these whispers and launched into an impassioned half hour speech, saying he hoped to high heaven we wouldn't be sent home. For if we were, it would mean the school board felt we were in some kind of very real danger. As long as the school day continued, we were probably safe. He then offered us all his home phone number and said we should call him if we were feeling freaked out and needed someone to talk to. (To be fair though, he also gave us his home phone number on the first day of class, saying we had no excuse for not knowing when an assignment was due because we could call him and ask. And just out of curiosity, I just found his current profile on my middle school's website, and he's still offering up his home phone number).

When 8th hour finally rolled around, it was finally my turn for Earth Science with Mr. Canfield. He was no longer crying, but he looked utterly defeated, pony-tail and all. He too, felt it necessary to share his thoughts on the days events for the better part of the hour. I was never particularly fond of Mr. Canfield, the dying-to-be-hip rookie teacher, with his highly exaggerated stories about life on the edge, which even as 8th graders we could see through like saran wrap. And most of that held true after this day (it was only the second week of classes after all). That day however, was different. For once you could tell he wasn't trying to feed you a pile of BS. This had clearly very deeply affected him, and he was actually speaking his conscience. It was very somber, and probably left the deepest impact on me of any of the talks I'd listened to that day. "Go home tonight and save your newspapers," he began, "some day you will frame them and they will be pieces of history. September 11th, 2001. This day will be remembered forever." As I said, the significance of that morning's events had slowly been dawning on me throughout the day, but no one had truly been able to put the situation into its full perspective for me until that moment. I finally got it, so to speak.

I recalled all of this, the way it humbled the most unexpected people, the dozens of American flags that blazed my walk to school for the next nine months, the way, for once, everyone seemed to rise to the occasion and embrace one another (barring the few yahoos who began vandalizing mosques), and a few tears ran down my cheek. For a few fleeting hours, it seemed that the news of bin Laden's capture might have a similar impact, facebook and the newscasts were flooded with unified voices, but even as it was happening I knew it couldn't last. By the next morning debates over who could claim the most credit had already begun. Cynicism over whether this would have any real impact in the War on Terror, and fears of backlash took hold. And so, here we were once more, back to square one, back to ground zero.