Is Fist-Pumping the Right Reaction to bin Laden's death?
on.wsj.com

As I watched the crowds gathering outside the White House on TV Sunday night in the wake of the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed, I spotted a young woman standing atop another's shoulders to get a better view of the festivities, and then a second, and a third. When they dismounted they all did so in the same way—with a sprightly, confident controlled fall, vanishing back into the arms of the crowd.

They were obviously cheerleaders, probably from one of the several colleges within a few miles of the White House. They appeared the same age as one of my daughters—in their early 20s. The sight of them made me wonder what, if any, lasting effect the events of 9/11 had on them, and on my children, what scars it left. The frat-house atmosphere suggested not much.

"The response was much more patriotism than reverence or fear," my daughter said over the phone from college. Like most of her peers she got the news not from television but from Facebook. "I was on Facebook and a friend's status was, 'We killed Osama bin Laden. America #1."'

President Obama and the operatives who finally brought bin Laden to justice deserve great credit—Mr. Obama particularly for his sang-froid. Obviously, he knew what was about to break while attending the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night. Nonetheless, he delivered his Donald Trump zingers with impeccable timing.

And the kids' euphoria was understandable. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were arguably their generation's defining and darkest moment. But the fist-pumping after the news of the terrorist's death, treating geopolitics like the Final Four, left me concerned. Although, I'm certainly in no position to throw stones. My astonishment the morning of 9/11 as I watched those planes plow into the World Trade Center, and then the skyscrapers crumble as if made of salt an hour or so later, was matched only by my amazement at the news that some of the hijackers had spent months beforehand in the U.S., even visiting a shopping mall in the days before the attack.

It showed the extent of my residual Cold War naïveté—raised on the gospel of American exceptionalism and the belief that the reason the Soviets had to turn their state into a gulag was because all their citizens would move here given half the chance—that I found it unfathomable that anybody who'd visited an American shopping mall, let alone spent months here, couldn't fall in love with this country.

Obviously, there's a big difference between the average person who dreams of living in freedom and religious fanatics whose idea of a better life is flying a plane into a building and taking thousands of innocents with them. But one thing 9/ll taught me to a far greater extent than I knew or was willing to admit is that we're not universally loved, and that the U.S.'s responsibility toward the rest of the world extends beyond selling them Sly Stallone films.

I think another reason my euphoria at bin Laden's death was tempered is because I'm a New Yorker. The Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction may be gone, but that doesn't mean that Al Qaeda, with or without Osama bin Laden, or some other group isn't capable of ruining your day.

Apart from thwarting another terrorist attack, the NYPD has done an impressive job over the last couple of decades reducing crime. Do I feel safer walking the streets at night? Yes. Do I feel safe? Not really. I prefer to think of myself as less paranoid than a hard-boiled realist, and looking over your shoulder as mere common sense. My hunch is that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly feels the same way—that Sunday night he was watching the celebrations at Ground Zero with one eye, watching the security cameras at the Brooklyn Bridge and Times Square with the other.

My hope is that dispatching bin Laden makes the world a safer place. But the New Yorker in me refuses to let me celebrate as guilelessly as those cheerleaders in front of the White House. There are bridges to the rest of the world yet to be built, work to be done. One of the effects of 9/11 should be to offer our children's generation a more sophisticated and nuanced world view than the one with which I grew up. Watching the celebrations Sunday night I'm not sure we're there yet.