In the aftermath of the death of Osama Bin Ladin, a lot of well-meaning control freaks and “Birkenstock liberals” have been expressing dismay over what they see as the inappropriate celebratory mood of kids in front of the White House. “We should not celebrate the death of a human being,” they tsk-tsk. Hand-wringing everywhere. Those kids were just drunken collegiate hooligans, they say, looking for an excuse to get drunker and rowdier. The death of Bin Ladin calls for solemnity, not celebration.

Well, maybe. But it seems to me that we aren’t actually  considering the experience of these young people. We assume that they’ve had the same experience over the last decade as we have, but they have not. We have witnessed the death of a mass murderer, but they have experienced the death of the bogeyman. Surely, Bin Ladin was the villain of their nightmares, the presence in the closet, ready to jump out at them at night, when the lights went out.

I am a child of the Fifties. I remember, with sharp clarity, how scared I was of the Russians, how absolutely convinced I was that Nikita Krushchev and his evil Red Army would be marching into Boston any day now, to kill me and my mom and my dog, Dinah. Stories of Russians dragged from their apartments in the middle of the night for daring to criticize their government were common dinnertime conversational fare. The television regularly showed pictures of East Germans, shot down as they tried to escape to the freedom-loving West. And I will never forget coming home school to see my mother sitting in front of the television, her hand covering her mouth in horror. There was President Kennedy, basically telling us that the Russians were up to no good, pointing missiles at us, and very soon we could all be dead, killed in the unspeakable horror of atomic war. The fear was powerful and ever-present. We didn’t talk about it much, examine it. We lived our lives as children but always, there was that knot in the stomach, that sense of dread.

I don’t know if my parents’ generation  understood the huge and fearsome impact world events had on our young little hearts. Perhaps if they did, they would have tried to shield us from the evening news, protect us from that which we could not possibly understand. I know that, following the collapse of the Twin Towers and the killing of 3000 Americans, many parents questioned whether or not they should protect their children from the 24-hour-a-day coverage of murder and mayhem and grief and pain. Many did, opting to censor information that reached the children. That was certainly a parenting strategy that came from a place of compassion and concern. But it had strange, unintended consequences.

At the college where I work, a History faculty member came to the faculty lunchroom wearing an expression of utter amazement.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I just had to explain to one of my students that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. She had always just assumed that he had done it. She was genuinely shocked to hear that it wasn’t true.”

It wasn’t completely surprising to hear that one of our students was clueless about history. They think about other things, these kids.  I shrugged.

“But it wasn’t because she was just ignorant,” he explained.  “Her parents wouldn’t let her watch the news, never told her anything, never talked about it in front of her. Over time, she just assumed that if we were invading Iraq and capturing Saddam Hussein, it must be because he did it. She was shocked when she found out that he hadn’t.”

What a great story!  I tried to put myself into the mindset of an 8-year-old, hearing about those events all those years ago, and it seemed perfectly obvious to me that of course Saddam Hussein did it, at least given what I knew about events.

I started to think about what the past ten years must have been like for the kids who were eight, nine, ten years old when the towers went down—kids who are just now at an age to go to college and get drunk on a weekend.  Osama Bin Ladin must surely have been to them what Nikita Krushchev was to me: the evil, dark force hell bent on taking from them all that they loved, or worse, killing them, torturing them, cutting off their heads. Indeed, it must be even harder for kids today, because every time they get on an airplane, they are reminded that someone is out there, just waiting to kill them. That someone might be in Pakistan, but that someone might also be on the plane, sitting right next to them. It must have been an anxiety that they carried with them, daily, unacknowledged but real and powerful, nonetheless.

Sometimes you don’t realize how you feel until you don’t feel that way any more. When Geraldine Ferraro was nominated as Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. I had not realized how  painful living in a sexist culture had been for me until one brave woman crashed through that barrier.  Maybe that’s what happened to those kids who danced and cheered in front of the White House on that Sunday night. Maybe they didn’t realize just how frightened they were until  that moment when they heard that the bogeyman was dead.