At the young age of twenty-one, I've witnessed major events in history. I watched at age 11 the Twin Towers burn and collapse down on top of thousands of people. I watched a NASA shuttle launch go wrong. I watched and rewatched the leaked video of Saddam Hussien's hanging. And on May 1, 2011, I sat on my living room floor at 11-something at night and watched President Obama announce to the American people that Osama bin Laden is dead. And while for a few minutes my heart smiled just a little bit -- the ONE man who has been responsible for ruining and terrorizing THOUSANDS of innocent people was dead -- it slowly sank back down thinking about what our beautiful country had to go through to get to this point, and more importantly what people had to sacrifice.
I have friends who fight for this country. Who sit in a hot desert for months, protecting us from an enemy that cannot be targeted to one area. And I have studied hours upon hours International Affairs, Arabic, Islam to help me understand what drives extremists. And I've heard my little cousins at a family barbeque explaining to one of my friends why their dad wasn't with us. "The bad men flew the plane into my Daddy's office." And while I'm happy that someone I believe to the be the devil manifested in a man's body has a bullet to his head, and can no longer order attacks on my precious country, stone women in public for walking too close to a man, showing too much skin, or educating herself, and turn children into orphans because their parents were 'martyrs' for the cause or weren't 'pious' Muslims, I cannot be happy that my cousins will never experience the things I did with my dad. Father-Daughter relationships are one of a kind, special, and precious. And they'll never have that.
So, while for a brief moment we as an American people can rejoice in our victory, tomorrow when we wake up to go to work and school, the war rages on, hate still grows, and little girls don't have their daddy.
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