Last night's celebration, bin Laden & 9/11 - looking back

As I've been writing about last night's celebration of Osama bin Laden's death, one theme kept popping up - the crowd was mostly college kids. That got me thinking... why college kids?

My first thought was, duh, college kids will take any opportunity available to party. And I'm sure that was partly true. But there was more to last night than drunken revelry. While the crowd did smell like booze a bit, it appeared to be less drunken Greeks and more students, like my friends and myself, who had just rolled out of bed, stone cold sober, but totally high on the euphoria of the situation.

Then a memory hit me. I was at the Newseum a few weeks ago with my friend, Jaime, and we visited the 9/11 exhibit there. The exhibit is home to a very poignant video about the disaster that left us both tearing up and walking away silent, and shaken up.

When we finally spoke, we talked about where we were when we found out planes had hit the twin towers. I was walking up the steps at Frank C. Whiteley Elementary School to Mrs. Hogan's sixth grade classroom with my friend Brittany, who told me that planes had crashed into the twin towers. I was 11 years old, and I honestly had no idea what the twin towers were, much less that our entire world had changed forever that morning.

And then, after Jaime and I finished our stories, Jaime said this - I'm trying to remember a time before 9/11, but I can't. I tried, and realized I couldn't really remember either. I can't remember what it was like to go to an airport without a little apprehension, and of course without removing my shoes and tossing out my water bottle. I don't remember a world without the fear of terrorism.

At that's when I realized why it was students who were celebrating outside the gates of the White House that night. They didn't remember either. And when we were told the symbol of the terror that cast a dark shadow over our world for most of our memorable lives was dead, we couldn't help but gather.

I was watching John King on CNN when I heard it. It was surreal, and hard to believe. King kept repeating the phrase "Osama bin Laden is dead, Osama bin Laden is dead," over and over, trying to get it to sink in. This is for real.

I read somewhere that it was silly for us to celebrate, because bin Laden was likely hardly even effective any more. They're missing the point. More than anything, he was a symbol. A symbol of thousands of our people dead, a symbol of evil, a symbol of fear. Yes, we know the fight against terrorism is not over, not even close. But this is undeniably a step. We killed fear.