Sorry about dumping another text wall here. I intended this blog to be more of a lighthearted photo journal of my experiences in Japan. I'll try to bring it around, but I felt like I had to write this, and I really didn't know where else to put it.
On Monday, as is my habit, I logged onto Facebook from my cell phone as I sat down at my desk to eat my lunch. One of the first status updates I read was my friend Brannon’s commentary on the death of Osama bin Laden. It was the first I’d heard about it. I immediately ditched my cell phone and booted up the shared office laptop.
The laptop is old and slow, and to make matters worse, it was just waking up. Groggy as it was, I forced the poor thing to scurry through every news outlet looking for President Obama’s statement. The English office at my high school is incredibly quiet and serious, even during lunch time. Japanese teachers, at least at my school, don’t get to leave for lunch. They don’t really get a break either. They’re still expected to work, but they’re forgiven—for a brief moment—for tending to their bodies’ basic needs. Normally, I’m as quiet as everyone else during lunch. I keep to myself at my desk and eat my sandwiches and soups and poke around on Facebook and Twitter while my coworkers scarf down cold white rice and grade papers. Monday was different though. I turned the volume up on that rickety old laptop, and hit play on a video of my president’s statement. That is, once I finally found it on some Texas town’s local news site. Every other video website on the net is blocked by the school’s filtering system.
History was being made, and I wasn’t going to wait until after work to catch up. When the towers came down ten years ago, I was a high school freshman. It was just before homeroom when the first tower came down, and I could tell right away that something was going on. Teachers were out in the hall talking about war and death in the present tense. They were obviously scared. The TV was already on in my homeroom. My homeroom teacher told everyone to shut up and sit down. He told us to take it all in, and to remember all of it forever because it was history—our history—and that we’d be answering questions about where we were and what we were doing right then for the rest of our lives.
Ten years later, there I was in a foreign country, but still at school; still watching the news. I was watching alone this time. As I sat there wide-eyed watching the first president I voted for—my president—tell me that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of terrorist attacks that brought an end to the America of my childhood and created “post 9/11 America,” had finally been found, my coworkers went about their work in silence. No one asked me what I was watching, or why I was watching it.
I’m not naïve enough to think that bin Laden’s death brings the War on Terror to an immediate end. I realize that things are much more complicated than the press and the propaganda machine would have us believe. I know we can’t be sure of what really really happened. I know things won’t just go back to the way they were. I know I’ll still have to take off my shoes at the airport. I can’t say that I’m happy, exactly, that a man is dead. I don’t celebrate death. Still though, I can’t help it—I feel a little relieved somehow. I feel like maybe, maybe, things can be a little different now. Maybe we can move on now. I’m pretty sure Obama has his next term secured. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to go home to a United States that will be fooled into electing Donald Trump as president. I’m optimistic, but who knows what’s next?
