Perhaps lost in all the relief and other emotions after the President of the United States shared with the world that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in a surgical strike in Pakistan, might be the direction we now take and how the road we have been on becomes the road we're now on.
For those in the New York City area there may have been some (though probably not much and certainly not enough) hoped-for closure, shared by those at the Pentagon who were targeted almost a decade ago as well as by friends and families of United Airlines Flight 93.
The singing of the Star Spangled Banner, the U-S-A chants and even reports of renditions of We Are the Champions all washed over many of us in the last thirty-six hours (Queen, seriously? Seriously) all somewhat obscuring and distracting us from the process of redefining what we do next.
Many of those in our armed forces whom we've sent into harm's way in the endless war following 9/11/01 were in middle school when all of this became all of that. Do you remember what the national headlines were in whatever news source you relied on the Day Before? Did you think then that you'd live to see now?
Will who we are and how we carry ourselves in the world change as a result of the death of a mass murderer? How well will we remember that we have lived though the end of a chapter, but not the end of the novel. What that looks like has yet to be written and the strength to continue to grasp the pen and make the sacrifices needed hasn't yet been measured.
Edmund Burke very neatly summed up our present situation and so it's down to us. "No one has the answer, but one thing is true. You got to turn on evil when it's coming after you. I know I said I love you; I know you know it's true. I got to put the phone down and do what we got to do." And do what we got to do....
-bill kenny
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