Like everyone else, I was shocked to hear last Sunday that Osama bin Laden had been killed by Navy SEALS. Although I didn’t feel inspired to run to streets and shout, “USA! USA!,” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of relief and closure. I remember watching the second tower fall on live TV from the library of my high school in Indiana. I was 14 years old and just a couple of weeks into my first-ever journalism class, and I remember one of the seniors coming back from the library and saying, “The World Trade Center has been attacked.” Nobody really knew what that meant, so after a few minutes of hesitation, my teacher hurried us through the halls to the big-screen TV near the library check-out area that always played the news. On Sunday, I watched the president’s statement with several 30-somethings who didn’t understand why college students in Washington, D.C., were flocking to the White House and celebrating bin Laden’s death. I tried to explain what a profound effect 9/11 has had on the social and political development of my generation.
“No, Facebook and Twitter have had a profound effect on them,” one early 30s-something replied. “They don’t care about 9/11.”
I didn’t pursue the point in part because I didn’t know how to phrase it. But I did point out that young people today are more likely to condone torture because they grew up in the terror age instead of in an era when traditional, “just” warfare existed. The New York Times noted that bin Laden has been like a boogie man hanging over Millennials, but to me it was more than that. In some ways, I think older generations were more jarred by the attack because they were so used to America’s dominance. We weren’t old enough to truly believe in American hegemony; we knew America was “the best” or the “safest” because that’s what we’d been told, but it wasn’t ingrained in us in any experiential way. We weren’t there when WWII was won or the Berlin Wall fell (okay technically I was alive, but I was a toddler). Older generations kept these crises across the ocean and were probably therefore more stunned when the war crossed our borders. I don’t think I understood until later what a big damn deal it was that the attack happened on American soil.
I’ve touched on this in older posts, so I don’t want to harp on it too much. But what really shaped the younger generation was what happened after 9/11. We came of age in uncertain times — particularly today’s college students, who were in late elementary and middle school in 2001. Osama bin Laden represents a long chain of events that led to America’s battered image both abroad and at home. Young people rallied around then-candidate Barack Obama in part because he represented a turning point — a departure from the fear and cynicism that marked our adolescence. It’s only fitting that he should be the one to oversee the take-down of Osama bin Laden. That he did it while be being bombarded by would-be politicians trying to capitalize on what is arguably humanity as its worst — the “birther movement,” aka modern manifestations of racism — makes it that much sweeter.
You had a journalism class in high school at 14?
Yep freshman year. One of my first articles was about how my high school was indefinitely banning all school dances except for prom because the students insisted on dry humping on the floor at homecoming.