After the demise of Osama bin Laden, many publications ran headlines that claimed how terrorism was forever changed, that Bin Laden dragged our post-9/11 definition of the word down to the bottom of the sea with him.

Figuratively? Maybe. His demise does signify the end of an era. The images, rhetoric and media after 9/11 made bin Laden the personification of terrorism, giving the term an identifiable villain. If anything, our understanding of terrorism was completely constructed around the single act that gained his notoriety as well as his image.

Terrorism remains exactly the same, rather his death left a void where his face and his being once served as a tool for understanding it. Politicians, the public, the media especially, all relied on bin Laden. He’s been our sole tool to illustrate terrorism throughout the past decade. Making his face synonymous with the term was to provide the simplest explanation.

So claiming that his death will change terrorism forever is simply responding to the void with a comforting thought to the likes of, ‘Ding Dong, the witch is dead.’

We cannot boil down the terrorism seen on 9/11 to a single person. It’s a complex network of hate that goes way beyond even al-Qaeda, an organization that clearly hasn’t quit because a leader died.

The United States continues to seek an end to terrorism, whether there’s a recognizable face or not. Rather than wait for someone to fill the visual and emotional void bin Laden left, becoming the next tool for sensationalized political rhetoric, let this moment be one of deeper understanding.

We can hope 9/11 will remain the most devastating act of terrorism the United States faced in our lifetime. But the death of bin Laden doesn’t grant us the ability to count on it. More importantly, we cannot let the ambiguity fall into an afterthought. Terrorism is as it was, which isn’t to say we should all be afraid. Rather its perpetuation should give the American public a reason to seek an understanding greater than the confines of bin Laden and his destruction.

There may be one less terrorist now than before, but the form and bases of the terrorism that manifested in 9/11 remains the same. The only thing that should change is our dependence on superficial knowledge.

Lauren Tousignant is a senior communications and rhetorical studies and writing major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at letousig@syr.edu.

Published on September 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm