I had never been part of such a raucous celebration, not even on Election Night. But looking from face to face, I didn’t see joy or triumph. I saw relief. For people my age, 9/11 was the formative experience of our formative years. As kids, we were told America could do anything. Then a terrorist attacked our country and murdered thousands of our people, and we couldn’t catch him no matter how hard we tried. For a decade, that failure cast a shadow on the promise we were raised to believe. Now, the shadow had been lifted. America had done what America set out to do.
