Crowds of jubilant students rushed to Lafayette Park in front of the White House on Sunday night to celebrate the death of one of history’s most infamous monsters. While the death of bin Laden will never truly heal the pain and tragedy of September 11, as patriotic Americans, we can all take pride in bringing a mass murderer to justice. We should also pause to consider how much the world has changed for the better since the horror of that day.
As President Obama speaks today at the site of the old World Trade Center, thousands of workers are building a new World Trade Center that will rise taller than the original to an impossible-sounding 1,776 feet in the sky. A fitting memorial will mark the hallowed ground where so many died, but the rebuilding that is finally underway is the truest kind of revenge.
Then, there are the young people in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and countless other places who, like the students at the White House on Sunday night, are now able to organize spontaneous street gatherings and protests—and indeed revolutions—on their cell phones. When bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists attacked us in 2001, when Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and Droids did not even exist.
At the World Trade Center in New York, and in the streets of Cairo and Damascus, people are making the choice between bin Laden’s fearsome vision of death and destruction and the American vision of freedom, peace, and prosperity. The greatest answer to destruction is not more destruction, but to build. The greatest answer to death is not more death, but to live in freedom.
It’s a shame that bin Laden wasn’t captured alive so that he could be there to see the new World Trade Center defiantly and victoriously completed, but at least he did live long enough to see dramatic changes in a world that has passed him by.
Now, instead of watching grainy videos of bin Laden’s latest fatwah, people everywhere are sharing in the struggles and triumphs of a growing wave of democracy across the Islamic world.
In the context of larger historical forces, bin Laden’s death is little more than a footnote. When Muslims largely began to suffer at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, it only hastened the decreasing influence of bin Laden’s evil ideology. Even though we are separated by vast oceans and different cultures, Americans and Arabs have already chosen a brighter future—a future without bin Laden.
