I tried my best to offer him the truth without adding unnecessary details. In short, I told him some very bad people hijacked airplanes and flew two of them into a pair of skyscrapers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Lots of people died, and the skyscrapers collapsed.
I wasn’t expecting the topic to come up again until the annual remembrance of 9/11 that awaits us each September, with each bright, warm autumn day reminding us of the morning the horror was unleashed.
But a few weeks ago, a spring break trip to New York City offered another, unexpected opportunity to discuss what cruelty some grown-ups are capable of. For our second day in the city, we had planned to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and I knew our route to the embarkation point at Battery Park would take us right by Ground Zero.
Having not visited lower Manhattan since long before that fateful day, I was unprepared for the unavoidable onslaught of images, tours and products related to the disaster that faced us as we made our way through the neighborhood. It seemed 9/11 Inc. was in full effect, serving as a tribute to both the long memories of Americans when we are done wrong and the entrepreneurship that drives the national work ethic.
Naturally my son, who I hadn’t briefed in advance about our route, was curious about all the hubbub.
“Remember when we talked about the people who flew the airplanes into the buildings in New York?” I said. “Well, this is where those buildings were.”
He was quiet as we moved quickly downtown, and through the remainder of the trip the topic didn’t come up again.
A few weeks later, the news broke of Osama bin Laden’s death and again the topic arose. I explained to him that bin Laden had been the man who planned the attacks on the buildings in New York. Without me expressing anything at the news other than, “Wow,” he surmised that the terrorist leader’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs was a good thing.
Talking further, he probed for more details. How did he die? He was shot by a soldier, I explained. Would we ever know who shot him? Probably not, and it was unlikely we would ever see the soldier get a medal or award for his deed, I said, because his work was so secret that it would be dangerous for anyone to know who he is.
For a boy obsessed with the Toys R Us version of espionage, it was an opportunity for him to see how the work of grown-up spies and secret agents played out in the real world.
Over the next week, the nearly non-stop news coverage prompted us to discuss the issue further - honestly more than I ever thought I would be chatting about international terrorism with a first-grader. Though I was as excited as anyone that such a looming menace no longer walked among us, I did my best not to revert to the overt glee displayed by many who cheered bin Laden’s death.
But if there’s anything a first-grade boy possesses, it’s a finely honed sense of justice. There is fair and there is unfair, and the two are mutually exclusive of each other. Notions of “good” and “bad” are starkly rendered in black and white - good people should be rewarded; bullies are bad and should be punished.
But it was especially eye-opening to me to realize that my young son, who I had thus far jealously tried to protect from the events of 9/11 and the full capacity for human evil, could so easily and calmly grasp that even though hurting others was wrong, the death of bin Laden was something that was justified. There was no gray area that could offer an explanation for his deeds, only the fact that he did something terrible and got what was coming to him.
So in spite of how we celebrated bin Laden’s demise or didn’t, our inner first-graders know deep down that the terror leader was the worst kind of bully and that at long last, he got what he deserved.
