Did you feel that moment? It lasted long enough for us Americans to take a collective deep, cleansing breath together as a nation. The symbol of 9/11 is dead. Let it out. Don’t we feel better?

We had all of about 8 hours (6 of which most of us spent sleeping, except for our wacky friends out there on Pacific time) before the various wack-a-doodles out there decided that 8 hours of unity was enough and just too darn politically dangerous. Then it all started up again: the deathers replacing the birthers, the criticism from the left that the right wasn’t giving Obama enough credit, and criticism from the right that the left was giving Obama too much credit . . . and in the middle of this are media pictures of the silliness outside of the White House. Throngs of people dancing for joy at the death of bin Laden. Add a few guns, women in hijabs and men in fatigues, and you have the standard crowd in a mideastern neighborhood its approval of a terrorist attack. It didn’t look, well, appropriate.

Death shouldn’t be celebrated, even if it is the elimination of a mass murderer. This is only another step in the continuation of the mideast conflict. Only when our last soldier is home for good should we take to the streets in joyous celebration.

Of course, there is, as gross as this sounds, a small part of me wishes that instead of burying all of bin Laden at sea, the Navy had chopped off his head, put it on a pike, brought back to the U.S. and paraded it around Ground Zero. Then displayed it on the Brooklyn Bridge.