Duly Noted | Patriotism without party

It was a typical Sunday night. I was sitting in bed “studying.” My roommate walked in and told me that President Barack Obama was expected to make an announcement any minute. I checked my top news websites, scanning home pages. Then I saw it, on the New York Times website, a slim banner on top of the announcement of Anne Curry replacing Katie Couric on the Today Show: “Osama Dead, U.S. Official Says.”

“Osama Dead, U.S. Official Says,” I recited to my roommate.

“Oh my god,” we both repeated.

For the next hour or so, I listened to various voices — Brian Williams, Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell — on the MSNBC live stream, waiting for Obama’s statement. They each went through waves of eloquence and stammering, trying to make sense of a monumental event in front of a national audience of millions. I checked websites and Facebook statuses. Back on the live stream, the camera panned to the empty podium, the red carpet and the hall of the White House. Goosebumps spread through my skin.

I remembered what it was like on 9/11. I was only in fourth grade, but I can picture that day, that week, so clearly. My mom took me out of school and brought me and my sister to my grandmother’s house in Elizabeth, N.J., just miles from Manhattan. I sat in a pink armchair in my grandmother’s living room, watching cartoons to placate my mother but switching to the news when she left the room. On the drive home, I took a cursory glance at the New York skyline from my car window. Gray smoke puffed murkily in the sky over where hours before the Twin Towers had stood. Terror never felt more real to me than it did that day, when I could see it from the back seat.

Sunday night, I felt a similar sense of intensity, but a different kind. It was patriotism. Tried, true, apple-pie-loving patriotism. It’s not like I haven’t felt proud of my country before; I felt it the night of Obama’s election. But Sunday night, watching footage of what Brian Williams hiply called “flash mobs,” I felt something even more all-consuming. All over the country, it looked like the parade scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

This is a totally non-partisan kind of achievement that reminds me that Americans really can do whatever we set our minds to, and we can do it without hating each other. I listened to Rachel Maddow describe the scene across from the White House, with a pair of celebrators standing next to each other, one holding a “Bush/Cheney” sign, the other an “Obama ’08” one. In the divisive political environment that has characterized the last few years, images like that are anomalies. I hope that after Sunday night, they won’t have to be.

My dad, an architect, is working on the Freedom Tower. I’ve always been proud of what he’s doing, but I don’t think I had been reminded of the importance of something like the Freedom Tower until Sunday night. Symbols like the one he’s a part of bind the nation together. They give meaning to the lofty ideals we have printed all over our money and documents and T-shirts.

There are, of course, things to be uncertain about. I’m a little nervous for my dad to go to work Monday morning. But, despite my usual pessimism, I feel like things are only going to get better. This event reminds Americans that fundamentally, we all want the same thing: a safe, free country to live in. And with that sort of unity, I feel like we can get through anything.

This is history. This is something that will be in my children’s textbooks (e-books?). This is America! On any other day, I would find an exclamation point excessive, but not today.

Rachel del Valle is a College freshman from Newark, N.J. Her email address is delvalle@theDP.com.

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