On the death of Osama bin Laden, and Abraham Lincoln

(Originally published May 15, 2011)


“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

--Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4 1865

One advantage of living in the nation’s capitol is being in proximity to great and momentous events. The disadvantage is that others abuse this closeness and take it for granted.

When the news broke on late Sunday, May 1, that Osama bin Laden was dead, many of my fellow young Washingtonians flocked to Pennsylvania Avenue right outside the White House to cheer the event. Most of them were students from the very close George Washington University, a fact not lost on me since I was among the exact same crowd two years ago in the same spot, celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Then, as well as two weeks ago, there was a palpable sense that this was, in the ever articulate words of our esteemed Vice President, a Big Fucking Deal, hence a desire among our generation to celebrate. It seemed a natural response to a moment of such great magnitude.

For me, I reacted not by celebrating, but by shedding tears. Not out of celebration, but rather out of relief. You see, for our generation, the attacks of September 11, 2001 marked our entry into adulthood, of knowing about the world outside the bubble of childhood. As children we are insulated in that bubble-and rightly so. But adulthood demands of us to know about things like terrorism, death, and hatred. The events of that day are vividly etched into my memory, every second recounted as if my mind instinctively knew how important that day was. And it was not just that day that was important, but all the days after it, a whole decade of them. Days of war, days of fear. This is what has defined my generation’s adult life, and so I shed tears when bin Laden was killed. Relived that maybe, just possibly, the insanity of the last decade would end.

And so, when a week later a beautiful Washington day presented itself for the first time in many months, I went for a long walk along our national mall. I thought I’d play tourist in my city, go to some museums, see the sights. But as it always does, the towering figure of Lincoln pulled me in, humbling in its grandiosity. I pushed through the usual scrum of tourists who see the sights through the lens of their cameras and those protesters that remind us that, obviously, the world is ending in two weeks. And there I read again Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which has always moved me more than his Gettysburg Address on the opposite wall.

Here was a man that had led this nation through four long and bloody years of violence. Here was a man who saw soldiers mowed down by the thousands at Antietam and Shiloh. He saw slavery, and all the injustices of his time. And still-after all that-he calls out for peace and healing. Any other president, and any other man, would capitulate to the calls for revenge and justice, but Lincoln calls for peace. So I shed a tear again, for this is the parallel to our age, this is the lesson for our time. Not celebration and joy, but somber calls to the better angels of our nature.

What is that parallel? If we are ending the error of being cowered by terrorism, as I do so dearly hope, how do we move forward? To answer these questions means looking at why a man like Osama, and those that follow him, want to attack us. Some would say it is our ideas and what we stand for. They must surely hate us for our freedom and democracy, right? Attacks of such great importance must have similarly great roots. 

I reject that notion. Men like bin Laden do not attack us for who we are, but rather who they think we are, and what they think we represent. When these Islamists see America, they don’t snarl at representative democracy. What they see is support for repressive governments; Egypt and Saudi Arabia come to mind. Osama and his cohorts were successful in taking well adjusted, middle class young men, and convincing them that the reason they couldn’t be rich in Saudi Arabia, or free in Egypt, was truly the fault of America. They were told that there was the real enemy, the man behind the curtain. 

As I walked away from the Lincoln Memorial, trying to think of what lesson Lincoln could teach our time, there is where it dawned on me. The Civil War was, at its heart, about expunging the original sin of slavery from our nation. Every compromise to avert war, every year that went past with people being held in bondage, struck at the heart of what America was. We are not Britain, defined by our borders, or France, defined by a language and culture. America is a nation of ideas, not a homogeneous group of people. Those central ideas, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, define us as a country more than a border or language ever has or will. Slavery struck at the heart of that. It undermined our central cause as an experiment in what a nation could be. Lincoln was fighting to correct that wrong, to rid our land of slavery and rededicate the nation to its founding ideals. 

In the world today, the sin of America is not at home but abroad. By supporting repressive regimes, we compromise with our ideals. By striking deals in support of peace in the short term, we deal a blow to what we could, and should stand for. Terrorists may attack us for these sins, but only we have the power to fix them. In order to seek a just and lasting peace we must become that shinning city upon a hill. America cannot be a powerful nation because of our military might. We cannot rest our power and influence in the world upon compromises with our core values. Rather, we should be powerful example of how great a nation can be if it adheres to those central tenants of freedom and democracy.

In this goal there is hope. Those young people pouring onto the streets of Tunis and Cairo are of the same generation as those who went to the White House on May 1^st. They did not fall for the ruse of men like Osama who want them to blame their misfortunes on America. Instead they went after their dictators, and called for them to be replaced by a flowering of freedom, democracy, and equality.  Those brave young people began the process of cleansing our sins for us, and in doing so sought for themselves the ideals that we sometimes forget ourselves. 

Let us work to live up to their expectations.