{"id":6119,"date":"2011-05-02T07:51:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T14:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6119"},"modified":"2011-05-02T07:54:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T14:54:26","slug":"undeniably-and-reliably-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6119","title":{"rendered":"Undeniably and Reliably Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The news began to come in around 7:30 last night.\u00a0 I was losing interest in a violent, depressing prison movie, so I picked up my smart phone to skim the latest on Twitter.\u00a0 A few informed people, mostly news types, were just beginning to tweet about Osama bin Laden&#8217;s possible death.\u00a0 Over the next half hour, the news on Twitter solidified.\u00a0 I turned the DVD off and turned on MSNBC.\u00a0 Donna joined me &#8230; she had been reading in another room to avoid the prison movie &#8230; and we settled in to wait for the president&#8217;s address.<\/p>\n<p>Is jubilation inappropriate?\u00a0 Immature?\u00a0 Probably, but that&#8217;s how we felt, and that&#8217;s how we still feel this morning.\u00a0 The sober angel sitting on my right shoulder says &#8220;Calm down, nothing much will change.&#8221;\u00a0 The grinning devil on my left shoulder says &#8220;It&#8217;s morning in America again!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re all going to remember last night.\u00a0 These are some highlights that will stay in my memory:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A tweet from someone in the stands at a Phillies game, describing thousands of smart phones lighting up in the stands as word began to spread.<\/li>\n<li>President Obama&#8217;s late night address to the nation.\u00a0 Upon hearing how much Obama knew and how long he&#8217;d known it, realizing that through all the nastiness and backbiting he&#8217;s had to endure over the last month, he had his eyes on the prize the entire time.<\/li>\n<li>The whooshing sound of air going out of Republican sails.<\/li>\n<li>The utter perfidy of the Pakistanis.\u00a0 They must have known.\u00a0 For years.<\/li>\n<li>A feeling of relief, and great happiness, that our own special operations forces carried out the operation, and that it wasn&#8217;t the result of a drone attack.<\/li>\n<li>Another tweet: &#8220;Breaking. Terror alert level raised to &#8216;Confetti.'&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The scenes of people assembling at the White House and at Ground Zero in New York City.<\/li>\n<li>An email this morning from an old, dear friend: &#8220;I nearly wept when I heard the news about bin Laden. It was like hearing Hitler  had been killed.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This morning I feel it as strongly as I felt it last night.\u00a0 Things are going to change now, and change for the better.<\/p>\n<p><em>Note: <\/em>the title of this post comes from the Wizard of Oz song: Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The news began to come in around 7:30 last night.\u00a0 I was losing interest in a violent, depressing prison movie, so I picked up my smart phone to skim the latest on Twitter.\u00a0 A few informed people, mostly news types, were just beginning to tweet about Osama bin Laden&#8217;s possible death.\u00a0 Over the next half [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,22,6,9],"tags":[136],"class_list":["post-6119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-military","category-terrorism","category-a-series-of-tubes","category-war","tag-osama-bin-laden"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6119"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6124,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119\/revisions\/6124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}