Osama Bin Laden Is Dead: Some Personal Reflections

I moved to the US in August of 2001 for graduate school at Cornell.

On a sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks later, after a hike up Cascadilla Gorge to get to campus from our house in downtown Ithaca, my roommate and I were told that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, we heard about the second plane.

In what was perhaps a moment of typical Canadian naïveté, my first thought was: “What are the odds of two planes hitting the same building on the same morning?”

But it didn’t take long to realize what had happened. I remember going to class — Econ 609 – Microeconomic Theory I with David Easley — in a daze that afternoon. I also remember waking up every morning for about a month only to have to realize all over again that this was not just a dream, kind of like how I had felt in the past after the death of close relatives or bad breakups.

As such, 9/11 pretty much set the tone for my life in the US.

After ten years, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that deprived so many of my fellow Cornell students from their loved ones  has finally been killed by a team of Navy SEALs working under the supervision of the Joint Special Operations Command. Both the New Yorker and the Atlantic have excellent analyses. And here is the President’s speech last night:

This will of course not mark the end of terrorism, but it no doubt represents a landmark moment in the history of the world.