how i found out about the death of osama bin laden:
we are basking in the glow of the golden goan sun. we’ve exhausted all beach related activities, and the only thing left to do in this small village by the water is to aimlessly wander into the one and only ice cream shop in town. in our elements, we order mango, almonds, figs, and afghan dry fruit ice cream. as the ice cream man gets ready to flex his scooping muscles, i hear the faint tremors of a television broadcast. i turn around to find karazai on tv, and ask the ice cream man what karzai might be saying (i remember uttering the words, verbatim, “what’s karzai saying?”).
casually, in between scoops, he tells us: “bin laden, he dead.” both of us leap forward with a “TURN ON BBC NOW.”
what unfolds is a mix of elation, relief, confusion, and an overwhelming feeling of: what now?
on initial viewing, bin laden’s capture seems like a win win situation. his death offers the extremist community their martyr, the obama administration their limelight in history, the intelligence community the unalloyed success that’s been a long time coming.
what remains unclear is what now happens to the kids who grew up to be young men and women in this time, to whom the war on terror was the backdrop to the coming of age, to awkward limbs, to the introduction of pubic hair, to first periods, to the discovery of pot, to good music, to the loss of innocence, to falling in love, to applying for colleges, to prematurely picking majors, to riding the current of horror that is “finding oneself” in college, to finishing papers in the nick of time, to acing tests and failing exams, to locking yourself in the room and promising yourself that you would not leave until you understand plato and then the feeling of sudden euphoria washing over you as you finally “get it”, to seeing current events on tv match up and pick up where the history books leave off, to formulating your political vocabulary for the first time, to voting for the first time, to caring for the first time in your life what candidates’ campaign platforms say. in short: to the likes of you and i.
9/11 is what catapulted me into the real world. i had had a tacit understanding of history and the passing of time. i had always been a keen reader of the newspaper – pouring hours into combing through them, sometimes cover to cover, reaping the crossword as my reward.
but it was only with the falling of the twin towers that i became an active agent in my own life, of my own time. it was only with the talks of the caliphate, war of/on islam, terrorism, and clashing of civilization that the broader currents of history began to matter to me. i only began to see myself in the world – i mean to really see and to know – with the new dawn of old dichotomies returning to our collective consciousness: east vs. west, christianity vs. islam, abundance vs. deficit, bush vs. rational choice.
and only as these initial confusions subsided, did i see the event for what it truly was: reawakening of the ever-squeamish question on torture, what this means for the obama administration saving face (every year is election year after all), worries over potential backlashes from the extremist community, whether or not osama’s capture extends beyond the realm of symbolic significance. and if it does, what this means for not just foreign policy makers in the white house, but for the lay man and woman, and in particular, to those who have known no other war but this war, known no other age but this age, known no other terror than this terror of fear-based actions and their consequences.
