CELEBERATING DEATH?
Harvard’s celebratory response to the news of bin Laden’s death resembled the nation’s: boisterous crowds, waving flags, bursts of loud song.
The crowd in Harvard Yard was triggered by a Facebook posting: “I was looking at the Twitter feed and it was leaked that bin Laden had been killed and that the president would be making the announcement,” recalled Tarigopula, who is a member of The Crimson’s Editorial Board and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Political Review. “I immediately changed my Facebook status to ‘Meet in front of the John Harvard Statue to celebrate!’”
Students did so in hordes. The magnitude of the gathering surprised Tarigopula. But he also thinks that there was a reason for celebration. “I remember where I was when 9/11 happened and a lot of my classmates and peers do as well. For the last 10 years we’ve been living under this cloud of terror from the attacks, and [bin Laden] in a way became the face of terror, at least in the beginning,” he said. Therefore, Tarigopula maintains that bin Laden’s death “was a unifying moment,” and that the celebration was simply “a big outpouring of patriotism.”
Not everyone interprets the gathering in the same light.
Many feel that the resounding jubilation was unjustified and even perverse—a sort of delight derived from another’s death. A prevailing phrase used by critics of the rallies is “celebrating the death of a human being.”
Anna J. Murphy ’12 said that she finds the celebrations “troubling” and that she has heard others refer to the jubilation as “simply in bad taste.”
Whitham also says he feels uncomfortable with the initial celebratory response. “This man was a total monster, one of the worst criminals in recent history. It’s not that I regret his death, but I don’t know that it was appropriate celebrate in that way.”
Whutham continues, “Obviously I think the world is better off without him, but if you just look at it in that simple sense then you’re missing the picture. Basically, for the last 10 years we’ve waged this global war on terror … That’s not something to celebrate.”
'DISTRACT PEOPLE FROM PROBLEMS'
But according to C.M. Trey Grayson ’94, the Director of the Institute of Politics, the generation of people now in college is especially thirsting for something to celebrate.
Much has been written about the generation’s experience in a post-9/11 world, often referring to the new realities of airport security, Homeland Security codes, and fear of domestic attacks. But the last decade has been unsettling in many more ways than just in terms of national security. Horror stories tell of college graduates who can’t find jobs because the economy is progressively worse, of people who are turned away from medical care because they can’t afford insurance, and of an education system that is failing the country.
A Gallup poll released earlier this year reveals that only 44 percent of Americans are hopeful that this generation will have a higher quality of life than their parents, the lowest recorded number for that question in almost 30 years.
To top it off, a new social infrastructure is evolving every single day with the advances being made in technology and social media. When Walter Lippmann said in 1912 that “Modern man is not yet settled in his world,” he could not possibly have known that 100 years later we would still be struggling to figure it out.
Whitham believes it’s difficult to separate the celebrations, this blunt assertion of America’s strength, from the trend lines of the last decade. “These last 10 years have been this really frightening time. This ‘Lost Decade’ has been really alienating,” he said. “The economy, the war, problems with health care. People are really hurting. Historically, it’s been easy to have a war or an event to distract people from problems.”
Pausing a bit, he added, “A lot of our frustrating is directed towards phantoms, and we see it everywhere. Towards phony liberal politicians. Towards immigrants. Look at the Tea Party. I see those complaints, but I also think that this passion is being misapplied.”
Americans, it would seem, are eager for good news, and the 9/11 attacks can be seen as the beginning of a sense of hopelessness. The celebrations following bin Laden’s assassination, then, cannot be considered in isolation. Tarigopula said, “Those who have grown up in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, I think, want to see justice being served.”