I wasn't sure if intellikid would be a participant in the revelry that broke out on many college campuses early Monday morning following the news of Osama Bin Laden's capture. But there she is, along with several thousand other students from BU and other schools, taking to the streets of Boston in a . . . what? What was it they were taking part in, exactly? Another BU student explains:
We have been given reasons to be cynical, and the rally represented a brief departure from that. We were not celebrating the death of an enemy. We were celebrating because, ten years later, after a childhood spent being told that our futures looked bleak, we have something to celebrate about.
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That statement from the student I suppose equates with how we felt when the Berlin Wall was finally dismantled after 40 years of Cold War. The only difference is substantially nothing has changed with that one man's death.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure the world is a better place without Osama, but I have to say that the riotous scenes of celebration looked distinctly triumphalist. It's just not very becoming of citizens of a superpower to be taking such joy in the death of a man from the 3rd world, however awful he is. The symbolism is important, but a capture and trial would have been more dignified and more serious: a bullet in the head followed by mass celebration looks like mob justice.
ReplyDeleteSince these "celebrations" seemed to be largely student-led, I wonder how much of it is attributable to end-of-semester fatigue. There also seems to be a strong ROTC presence in the crowd - they might have contributed a good deal of the "chest-thumping" going on.
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