“Osama Bin Laden is dead”

“Osama Bin Laden is dead”

That was not a typo. For nearly ten years I and so many others have waited to hear those words. It bears repeating.

As an American, a native New Yorker, a person among millions who can recall exactly where they were when the original towers went down and a person currently working two blocks from where the sparkling glass walls that will comprise the towers of the new World Trade Center itself, I am near speechless at the sheer wonder of this.

I cannot begin to imagine the extent of the sense elation/vindication the 2,974 families of the initial victims of 9/11 and the countless soldiers in Afghanistan we’ve lost must feel at this moment.

Obama can have his glory as being the president that got Public Enemy No.1. The political pontiffs can continue to go back and forth on their reports; I understand Pakistani is already ensuring they get their fair credit for their part in this operation, there will be time for that. When Barack Obama was first running for President, the spell checkers kept correcting his last name to “Osama”. I find it a fantastic poetic justice that tonight as I typed Osama my auto-correct changes it to Obama.

Still, as happy as I am, and I won’t lie, I am damned happy he is dead, a part of me is apprehensive. This by no means indicates our brothers and sisters-at-arms will be coming home anytime soon. Even as I type this I am reminded the bomb threat in Times Square here in New York, by someone inspired by the words of Bin Laden will be a mere a year ago on May 4th. It is still very much our reality that not all of the world will be happy out this. I fully understand our war on terror is hardly over. Osama Bin Laden may have merely a figurehead for Al Qaeda at this time, but he was their figure and we’ve just made a martyr.

But for tonight and the coming days, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, I have just these words:

Ding dong Osama’s dead!
Bin Laden’s dead!
Bin Laden’s dead!
Ding dong Osama Bin Laden’s dead!