Baila Olidort

It didn’t take long for the rejoicing that erupted when news of Osama bin Laden’s death was heard, to come under scrutiny and criticism. But I am not convinced that the outburst of joy deserves to be regarded with opprobrium.

The suggestion that Americans who took to the streets following the news were reveling in the death, per se, of bin Laden, unfairly attributes to them primitive behaviors out of character to most Americans.

So the ensuing debate about whether it is appropriate to be joyful at the enemy’s demise, though worthy in its own merit, seems besides the point in this instance. Americans would have celebrated no less had bin Laden been captured rather than killed. Their joy, I believe, was quite simply the response to a rare moment of clarity. 

When President Obama addressed the nation Sunday night, we heard a different man from the one who spoke to us in the early days of his presidency. Back then, the starry-eyed president, naïve about what he might achieve with his gratuitous embrace of America’s enemies, was clearly more comfortable in the safe, gray space in between the absolutes of black and white where everything is relative, and one creative interpretation is as good and valid as another. 

But things looked different in the situation room, and when he emerged from there Sunday night, Obama exuded the kind of confidence that comes from real-life experience. Speaking with moral certainty about the decision to eliminate bin Laden, he went so far as to say that news of his death should “be welcomed”—a statement that must have pricked the ears of many politically-correct listeners—but that indicated that our President had finally come to terms with a necessary truth: one cannot presume to be a leader unless they are capable and willing to commit to moral judgments and to act upon them decisively. 

In a society such as ours, where equivocation often seems to be the only acceptable moral position, where nuance and sophistication are generally preferred to the simplicity of absolutes, evil as well, is often re-imagined, and the world, at least for people forced to live with their feet on the ground, becomes an even more confusing and more dangerous place than it already is. In this cultural context, the idea of pursuing justice itself seems to require justification. 

So when Obama declared that bin Laden’s death makes it a “good and historic day,” and that “justice has been done,” many Americans breathed a sigh of relief—not because they thought Osama bin Laden was at their doorstep—but because in that hour, in the very frank, unaffected words that Obama spoke, he gave voice to their shared but suppressed moral convictions. 

He let the people know that—our refined social and political attitudes notwithstanding—we yet need to resort to the simplicity of right and wrong, and that taking a moral stand may at times be the necessary, courageous and honorable thing to do. Clearly, many Americans felt this was something to sing about. No apologies needed.