The Day We Got bin Laden, It Was Not Cute To Feel Like An Outsider

Well, one of the reasons I was excited to move to UAE is to see a different world perspective, and the bin Laden death certainly affected me differently here.

I'm proud of what I consider an important accomplishment for our national defense, and I'm highly interested in the details of the mission. But in an unfamiliar position of perceived vulnerability, I was mostly thinking of myself for the first 24 hours.

Still unwilling to let go of my American sports fixation, I woke up at 4 a.m. Monday GCT - in time to watch the last two periods of the Capitals game. After they disgustingly handed Tampa Bay a 3-2 OT win and 2-0 series lead on a shit line change 2.5 hours later, I angrily and abruptly went back to bed. Hadn't heard peep about Osama during the game, and I had been dividing my attention with Twitter, Facebook and Penn State football message boards. Must have just missed the early breaks on those platforms.

When I woke up again around 10 a.m. and checked Twitter, it was everywhere.

My first reaction was: "Wow, we finally got him. Justice wins out."

Within the first half hour, I had shifted to: "I'm in the Middle East now, I wonder if this will affect anything?"

And then finally, after receiving a fairly cautionary email from Leslie (who had left for work before I woke up) and reading the U.S. Warden Message (Hollywood has led me to become uneasy about any situations involving wardens), I was pretty freaked out.

Don't go outside any more than you need to. Don't visit crowded places. Don't take cabs. There could be some serious bin Laden supporters around. Anti-westerner sentiment that might have been below the surface may be ready to manifest itself in the form of a public incident. Someone like me could get victimized. This was the message I was internalizing.

Thus I spent most of the day feeling surprised, uncertain, alone and vulnerable, and for the first time since my early days, I would have loved to teleport home. I purposefully didn't leave the apartment at all yesterday until about 8 p.m. when Leslie and I grabbed carryout Italian from the mall. She went to work where business went on, which made me feel like a wuss, but she did have an office full of Americans sharing the experience.

It was was undoubtedly an overemotional overreaction on my part, but it felt like a potential game-changer on life here. The comfort that I had built over the last month seemed lost. That's not to say I was thinking "I wish we hadn't taken out Osama so I could still take carefree walks to Texas Chicken." I just had no concept of my own safety.

In the light of the second day, I'm no longer feeling or behaving like a 10 year old spending a night in a house alone. The good ol' Al Wahda mall next door has welcomed me in and taken my dirhams in exchange for Starbucks and Chinese food the same as any previous day.

Realistically, it's unlikely that UAE structures are going to be retaliation targets, or that westerners in this country are going to be attacked, but it's possible. I still can't say what the chances are. But you try to take a step back and assess the situation realistically and proceed with life.

Most of my family has been to Jerusalem. Many of my friends and I have been to baseball games at Tiger Stadium. It's a new type of safety concern for me, but that doesn't mean it's a grave one. Have some fortitude and adapt, Dan.

Other than that, I've been watching the news and reading the papers to try to get a sense of the Arab perspective. The image above is of today's The National, the English newspaper in Abu Dhabi that paid me to write two local soccer stories week. The themes of the opinion pieces seem to be 1) Osama was evil 2) he hasn't had much impact on Al Queda operations for a while 3) by orchestrating 9-11, Bin Ladin provoked the U.S. into bringing a fight to the Middle East and causing a lot of collateral damage.

I would like exposure to more of a "man on the street" perspective from the people of UAE, but the newspapers and English-speaking channels I've watched (CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera) haven't taken that angle yet. And I certainly can't figure anything out by studying faces at the mall.

I will say that I found some of the celebrations that they aired in the U.S. to be over the top. This perspective in Salon nearly mirrors my own view, but basically, I think there's a fine line between appreciating the serving of justice and celebrating the taste of blood. Without sympathizing for the incredibly evil, there's still a humanitarian-minded high road available for the taking here, and it doesn't involve crowd surfing.