FREE MOLLY

This morning I walked to work above ground for the first time in five months. Everyone I passed seemed to be holding their head a little bit higher than usual. I don’t often look upon the people I pass on the street with much feeling, but today I took great pleasure in knowing that this morning we all shared the same  collective knowledge. Not that Michael Jackson had died, or that the Packers won the Super Bowl, or that Tiger Woods was a freak, but…you know. Something we could all agree on, or at least agree was relevant.

My Facebook feed is loaded with contrarians, armed with the same three pacifist quotations, who claim that the assassination of Osama bin Laden is not something to be celebrated.

I respectfully disagree.

Ten years ago I didn’t know what “hijack” meant, but I learned it in the way I wish I could learn everything. I saw it before I heard the word, and heard it before I saw the word spelled out. I didn’t even know it was possible, physically, to beat the system of airport security; I didn’t know it was possible to hate other people so much that you would die to secure their deaths.

I’m sure I would have learned this all eventually, but perhaps not so viscerally and at such a young age (13). Here’s what I remember: going to my locker in the middle of class. Hearing two teachers talking, one saying “they’ll declare war by Monday.” It was the first time I ever heard someone use the word “war” in an immediate sense. I asked her what she was talking about. She told me to go to class; I would find out.

The rest of the day was weird. No one could tell what was true, what was speculation, what was propaganda, what were lies. Someone said that Oshkosh Truck might be attacked. (That was speculation.) After school my dad picked me up as usual. My whole family went out to dinner. I wrote two pages of what I guess was a journal entry, but there was no actual journal. I cried myself to sleep, and woke up feeling heavy. There was a gray ball just outside my field of vision, a disorientation not really of space or of time, but no less profound. It was the realization that history wasn’t confined to the past, that it never stopped, and that I was swimming in it.

My generation was late to the party that was the 20th century, but we heard about it: the hedonism of the 20s, the righteous austerity of the 30s, the national ascent of the 40s, the well-intentioned sterility of the 50s, the identity crisis of the 60s, the newfound awareness of the 70s, the material excesses of the 80s, the effortless optimism of the 90s. (That’s when we came in.)

It ended abruptly in 2001. And the decade that followed was the worst hangover imaginable. Ready or not, we came of of age.

Peggy Noonan, in a column about my generation’s relationship with 9/11, wrote of how horror, over time, can become “absorbed sadness.” And I think it’s safe to say that I handled it in that way. The gray ball became less spherical as I grew older, but it wasn’t being destroyed, just stretched out to cover more, like water slowly spreading. I find it easiest to just call it depression. I’ve never consciously attributed it to the effects of 9/11, but to do so is just as logical as any other explanation I’ve found. And trust me, I’ve been looking.

This is what the death of Osama bin Laden means to me: the snake is eating its tail. 2001 and 2011 as the same point on a circle. For my generation of Americans, bin Laden brought evil out from the realm of abstraction and into reality. And last night, the veil of my absorbed sadness, borne of horror, was lifted. He is no longer a feared name and a living face that no one can find. He is dead. I am alive.