bin Laden is dead

I'm writing this about just a few hours after the President of the United States and Commander in Chief Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

In terms of how I received the news: I was playing an internet game at the time and was also watching "Undercover Boss" on CBS when I did some TV channel surfing at about 8:25 my time (Mountain Time). I saw that channel 35 (Fox News) and channel 37 (MSNBC) had announced that the President was going to speak momentarily. The original time scheduled for the President's speech was 10:30 PM Eastern time (8:30 PM Mountain Time).

After the time for the announcement came and went, I decided to go have a cigarette in my garage in preparation for viewing the announcement. During the 5 minutes I was smoking in the garage, I thought hard about what kind of announcement Obama would make so late on a Sunday night: Gadhafi dead? Nuclear attack on the USA? And of course I thought: bin Laden dead? After some thought I decided there were few things that would merit an announcement so late on a Sunday other that bin Laden had been either captured or killed.

Sure enough, when I returned to my TV around 8:45 Mountain Time, I saw the announcement on the bottom of the screen on one of the major networks that bin Laden was dead. I confirmed this to myself by surfing to a couple other news networks, and by this time they were all reporting the same: that bin Laden had indeed been killed.

Shortly thereafter I called one of my close friends in the Central Time Zone encouraging him to check out one of the news channels. We had expected Obama to speak momentarily so it was a short phone call. And there were a few more false starts: announcements that Obama would speak in 2 minutes, then it was postponed. Finally, Obama spoke starting around 11:35 Eastern (9:35 PM my time) and ended about 9 and a half minutes later. During the speech, Obama announced the killing of bin Laden and spoke of the significance of this event.

I recall being pleased with this announcement. And the two words that I thought about when examining my emotions at the time were "relief" and "closure". Sure enough, interviews of folks either in Washington DC or in Times Square in New York City mirrored both of these emotions: "relief" and "closure".

Not too much else to report at the moment other than my initial feelings. However, since the President's original announcement, I've thought that this will be in the news for awhile, at least the next couple weeks, and secondly that I'd like to see the picture of bin Laden dead (maybe a bit morbid on my part, but my desire nonetheless).

--SDP