Bin Laden's Death: the Celebration near the White House
By Melati Kaye, published May 6, 2011

Hearing news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, I felt like I was witnessing the change of an era. The world’s most wanted terrorist for the last ten years, Bin Laden had struck a dull, persistent fear in many Americans after masterminding the collision of three commercial jetliners in 2001 into New York City’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

I, like many others the night of May 1, 2011, felt compelled to get as close to the source of the news as possible—whether at Ground Zero where the towers once stood or the White House where President Obama made the official announcement that Bin Laden was dead.
The following is some of what I saw as I watched President Obama’s statement (at the Wardman Marriott, two blocks away from my boyfriend’s Washington D.C. group house) and some of the excitement we saw in the streets shortly after.

11:30 p.m.  May 1, 2011. -- “That guy,” says the middle-aged man who stood with us, peering at the hotel lobby television screens, “he was involved in 2001 when a plane flew into two buildings in New York [City].”

He pointed at the headline flashing on CNN –“Osama is Dead”—and his 9-11 memorial baseball cap, with a sketch of the Twin Towers.  These are his aids to educate us on Osama Bin Laden’s effect on national and international politics over the last decade.

A few minutes later, four life insurance lobbyists, in town for a conference, stopped to watch President Obama’s announcement of Osama’s death.

George W. Bush was going to talk to them the next morning. It would be his only public speaking event the day after the completion of at least one goal from the War on Terrorism that he began.

There was magnetism in D.C. that night. If you watched the presidential speech, you wanted to be as close to the source of news as possible.

So, we headed to the north lawn of the White House. We weren’t the only ones.

A soldier joined us as we swung our bikes onto 16th Street en route to the White House. He had just returned from Iraq in February. He had on headphones and shorts hiked higher than the current fashion.

“What are you listening to?” I asked him.

“Country music,” he said with a southern twang and giant grin before pedaling away, yelling “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

At H Street, a traffic jam of taxis, American flags and screaming people jammed the two block radius up to the fence of the White House’s lawn.

Every person 35 or younger in D.C. at that moment seemed to be there, irrespective of politics.

On Pennsylvania Avenue, two guys stood with flags tied like capes. One had on the star spangled banner, the other wore a lime yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Near the front of the press someone held a Bush-Cheney sign.

Spiderman and Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera made guest appearances.

Amid the multiple versions of the national anthem, “America the beautiful” and “Fuck [George Washington University] finals,” one chant rose again and again --“Yes, we did.” 

It was confusing because I was pretty sure this wasn’t the only thing President Obama hoped to accomplish during his election, or even what he was referring when he chose his campaign slogan.

But the crowd at the White House probably wasn’t referring to Obama or his campaign. An attempt to raise a chant of “Four more years [of Obama as President]” only got three takers.

Perhaps the “Yes, We did” signaled the arrival of a new political climate or at least the hope for one, explained one college kid I found holding a fiddle at the edge of the crowd.

The son of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) officer, he had grown up in Zambia before moving back to the States in fourth grade, three weeks before a commercial jet liner flew into the towers of New York’s World Trade Center.

He said that event, on September 11, 2001, was the first moment he became “politically aware” –which in fourth grade meant awareness of who the American president was.

The resulting political climate that plunged the United States into terror was what he thought to be normal.

For him, the death of Bin Laden completely changed the definition of the political scene.

“What do you feel inspired to play?” I asked, pointing at his violin.

He smiled and started off on an Irish jig, which set part of the crowd off dancing and recording the occasion with their cell phone cameras.

The following are some photos I took of the rally.

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