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 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.
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.
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.
I feel neither happy nor sad about yesterday’s events.
Just indifferent.
Maybe that’s the right attitude.