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EmptyTimCup
Guest
In Celebrating OBL’s Demise, the Kids Are All Right
Some of their elders, not so much.
On the evening of May 1, I was heartened to see crowds of mostly young adults waving American flags and chanting “USA! USA!” in front of the White House, near Ground Zero, and elsewhere to celebrate our military’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Sadly, my sentiments are far from universal.
The next morning, certain of their elders, from perches of alleged moral superiority, began wringing their hands in an ongoing critique which lasted the rest of this week. At the Washington Post, petulant Petula Dvorak called the apparently spontaneous festivities “crazy” and “almost vulgar,” while “Spirited Atheist” (that’s really what she calls herself) Susan Jacoby was “repelled by the scenes of mindless jubilation.” A professor at Iowa State University, where 1,000 students reportedly celebrated on campus, told the Des Moines Register that he found it all “unseemly” and “tacky.”
The topper came Wednesday morning on the Today show, when contributor and psychiatrist Gail Saltz criticized the celebrants for messing with the heads of today’s kids by creating “a contradictory image” of joy in bin Laden’s death, claiming that the revelers “reacted in a way that later on they may not be happy about.”
Let’s talk about kids and trauma, Gail.