Like many people, I got up this morning, checked the news websites, and saw that something world-changing happened overnight.<\/p>\n
Osama bin Laden was dead.<\/p>\n
And I was utterly indifferent to it.<\/p>\n
Oh, I read articles on a half-dozen sites, from straight news to instant commentary. And I coudln’t really make myself care<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I thought briefly of writing something snarky on Facebook along the lines of “In 2001 President Bush learned that bin Laden was determined to strike in the US; in 2011 the world learned the US was determined to strike at bin Laden” — a reference to George Bush’s stated indifference to locating bin Laden<\/a>.<\/p>\n But. The death of the head of al-Qaeda, the man behind the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington, wasn’t a time for partisan snark.<\/p>\n Something else, too. History went off the rails a decade ago; bin Laden’s death doesn’t undo that derailment. The people killed in New York, Washington, in Afghanistan and Iraq — bin Laden’s death doesn’t bring them back.<\/p>\n I feel neither happy nor sad about yesterday’s events.<\/p>\n Just indifferent.<\/p>\n Maybe that’s the right attitude.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like many people, I got up this morning, checked the news websites, and saw that something world-changing happened overnight. Osama bin Laden was dead. And I was utterly indifferent to it. Oh, I read articles on a half-dozen sites, from straight news to instant commentary. And I coudln’t really make myself care. I thought brieflyContinue reading “On Osama bin Laden and Indifference”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[273,795,379],"class_list":["post-5780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-george-bush","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-terrorism","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}