Cheering bin Laden’s death: In bad taste?

“At last, something big to celebrate and lift America’s mood,” said Liz Sidoti in the Associated Press. When the death of Osama bin Laden was announced on Sunday evening, Americans put their “nasty partisan politics” aside to celebrate the vanquishing of a common foe. Spontaneous celebrations erupted in the nation’s bars and ballparks. Crowds of young people congregated outside the White House and at the World Trade Center site in New York to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and wave American flags. For a few moments at least, “the nation’s spirits were lifted.” Mine weren’t, said David Sirota in Salon.com. We’re all entitled to feel relief that a mass murderer is dead, but my heart sank at the sight of drunken college-age kids celebrating as if it were a football victory. A country that “finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed” is not the America I used to know. By celebrating death, “we may be inadvertently letting the monsters win.”

Give those kids a break, said Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. This “color-coded terror alert generation” grew up in the shadow of 9/11, their lives defined by paranoia, stringent security, and war. For them, bin Laden was the “ultimate bad guy.” Let’s not deny them their “confetti-in-the-streets moment of victory.” That’s especially true given that so many of the children of 9/11 later became “soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq,” said The Boston Globe in an editorial. The terrible cost of those wars—almost 6,000 U.S. soldiers dead, and tens of thousands maimed and injured—has directly affected “almost every high school class that graduated after 2001.” If revelry is how this generation sheds some of its psychic burdens, then “let them revel.”

I was part of the crowd at the White House, said Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic, which included a young man with a sign that said “A Happy Muslim,” uniformed soldiers, and lots of young people filled with authentic joy. This wasn’t some “bloodthirsty” mob incited by base, tribal passions. Bin Laden, let’s remember, “killed more Muslims than Americans,” and “represented one of the most poisonous ideas of our time”: that a world corrupted by modernity and tolerance could be purified by “sanctified violence” in which tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered. “If any death justifies rejoicing, the death of Osama bin Laden does.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up