As the news began to leak on the night of May 1 that U.S. forces
had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a crowd began to form just
north of the White House, in Lafayette Park. By midnight, President
Obama had confirmed the news on national television, and the
spontaneous celebration had grown to several thousand people,
filling up Pennsylvania Avenue and spilling out onto the
neighboring streets.
The crowd comprised, mostly, undergraduate students from George
Washington, Georgetown, and American Universities. They waved
flags, climbed trees, danced around, and chanted and sang: the
national anthem and “U-S-A! U-S-A!” were popular choices, but so
was “F**k Osama!” (without the asterisks) and other edgy cheers.
Nor was that the only rowdy aspect of the scene. It almost felt
like a postgame victory riot at a big university, complete with
kids shotgunning beers and hopping fences to climb statues.
In fact, many big-name sports schools around the country did
feature similar rallies. At Ohio State, undergrads jumped into
Mirror Lake-an activity usually reserved for the weekend of the
Michigan game. West Virginia University students burned couches, as
is their wont. Penn State’s Beaver Canyon filled up with people
singing “Born in the USA.” And so on.
The average reveler at all these events was probably 19 or 20
years old, meaning that he would have been just past the age of
reason on September 11, 2001. For most of this student’s conscious
life, Osama bin Laden played the role of arch-bogeyman, responsible
for two open-ended wars and the vague but constant threat of global
Terrorism. Bin Laden’s death represented one of the few instances
of closure in an otherwise interminable struggle that had already
lasted half the student’s lifetime.
Yet it’s worthwhile to consider the many ways in which the news
that Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden was of no consequence to the
average college kid. By the time today’s undergrads had entered
high school, it was clear that bin Laden had utterly failed to
destroy the American way of life. Young men face no draft-the
closest almost all of them will get to combat is Call of Duty:
Black Ops for Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The threat of a domestic
attack is negligible, and a trip to a mall or sporting event is a
care-free experience. For most students, the global war on terror
centered in Afghanistan and Iraq is a remote concern, apart from
the occasional news story about a drone attack in Pakistan or a CIA
sting operation netting some pathetic would-be jihadi. The
post-9/11 American collegiate experience has not been drastically
different from the pre-9/11 experience, except for the TSA lines at
airports.
Of course, for a 19-year-old, stepped-up security is not a
recent, temporary compromise for the sake of airport security, but
rather just the way things are. Similarly, the Department of
Homeland Security is not an ad hoc response to the rise of
Terrorism-it’s always been there. Unless the student was
precocious, he doesn’t recall a time before government wiretaps of
U.S. citizens, drone assassinations of terrorists all over the
Middle East, and the torture of enemy combatants were all both
routine and controversial. In other words, while the classes of
2001 and the class of 2013 both grew up in domestic tranquility,
the latter did so in a surveillance state and the former
didn’t.
Will it be any different for the classes of 2023 or 2033?
Obama’s killing of bin Laden, in addition to so many of his
continuations of George W. Bush’s extraordinary defense measures,
highlights the reality that the massively enlarged security
apparatus is likely here to stay. We’ve traded diminished personal
freedom and wars on the other side of the world for safety and
comfort at home.
It’s a package deal that the students outside the White House in
the very early morning of May 2 seemed to embrace wholeheartedly.
One of the other most popular chants from that night: “Four more
years! Four more years!”
