I am happy tonight.
The core of morality is that a person should always know good from evil and should always celebrate good and hate evil. Hating evil means wanting to see it destroyed and acting against it, whatever it means to do that and in whichever ways are possible. Celebrating good has to mean, among a lot of other things, celebrating the annihilation of evil.
For those reasons and for many others, everyone who loves morality and decency should raise a toast tonight to the liquidation of an evil, wicked and cruel man who was obsessed with death and whose actions directly caused many thousands of people to die and millions more to suffer. Everyone should use an alcoholic beverage, which he banned, to toast the extermination of this sick leader of the ghoulish death cult that seeks to spread evil and hates all that’s good.
Besides hating Osama bin Laden because I love good and hate evil: as many people know, I was a 20-year-old NYU junior on 11 September 2001 and I was standing a few blocks from the World Trade Center when the first tower fell. That day’s events, and the events it set in motion that absorbed me, changed my life in every way and continue to change it in ways that I can hardly begin to explain.
In a lot of ways, everything that happened in my life from that morning until right now has been affected by my shock, then by my constant memory, then by my resolve, then by my lessons, and finally by the person I became from all those and from living in what the pundit class calls the “post-9/11 world.” In a big sense, I’ve never felt like I was even in a “post-9/11 world.” In the paradigm of some people having a 10 September mindset and others having a 12 September mindset, I don’t know that I ever entirely moved on from the exact same mindset I had on the afternoon of 11 September, when I’d returned to my apartment and begun wiping the thick gray World Trade Center dust off of my clothes.
As I indicated, I was in shock then, and my shock returned tonight when I sat in a cafe and saw Wolf Blitzer, that steady bearer of all that is News, making the announcement. I really couldn’t stop shaking.
I knew I had to come back to my computer and reread the story of what I saw on 11 September 2001, and look at the World Trade Center pictures I took that day.
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