It is an ending like all meaningful endings, an ending that leaves us with more questions than answers. What will it mean? What was it all for? Why now? Why then? What happens next?

Somewhere, in a million-dollar complex in an apparently secure and quiet suburb of the capital of a shaky ally, Osama Bin Laden met death in a particularly messy way. It was not a robotic killing, not, apparently, a surrender, not an uprising, not even, it seems, a betrayal. It was a small, quick mission after months and months of planning. He was shot in the head, shot in the chest, as well, it sounds. He had bodyguards. He used a woman as a human shield.

I expect those details will change. I expect, however, that the feelings I see on television will not. This is a victory. It is a long-awaited period on the end of an extremely long sentence.

Bin Laden's story is well known. He was a wealthy man who used his influence and his affluence to encourage the worst kind of paranoia and hatred. He drew together a band of like-minded, fear-mongering men, and with them concocted a plan that sent terrorists onto American soil. That plan left nearly 3,000 citizens dead in New York, in Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania. It also changed the way we think of our personal safety in ways that can never fully be forgotten.

The time before bin Laden is not precisely the time before 9/11. He was here before it; he was the shadowy figure behind international attacks, a vague but growing threat to those who -- before -- were tasked with worrying about the vague and distant threat of terrorism on our safe-seeming shores.

So I see -- I choose to see -- the outpouring of cheer among my countrymen and women not as a celebration of one man's death; I see, in these smiling faces, relief. I see the belief that this will mean something is going to get better, that something will now get easier. While I don't believe that, really, I do feel some recognition. I see and even share the hope in these young faces that the America of our childhood fables still exists -- an America that can overcome by might and right, an America that does, as the President said, stand up and protect its citizens:

[A]s a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.

That is the fairytale we have always been told of America. It is the exceptionalism we have lived without since September 11, 2001. In some ways, demanding its return, we have cried out for vengeance. We have cried out for a physical justice that, tonight, has been meted out halfway around the world.

Death is not worth celebration. Relief, though, is. There is no return to the normal that existed before 9/11, but there is comfort to be found in the promise -- the bloody, vengeful promise -- of American-style justice being fulfilled. Photo Credit: Matthew T. McGregor / Flickr / CC License