Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism, Being an American and Rejoicing in Death

For some reason, this has been gnawing at me all day. Fortunately, I’ve had one of those days where I’ve sat behind a computer and had to work on meticulous details about a health care module I’m building, so I’ve had little time to really reflect on anything. But when you’re doing that sort of drudgery work, your mind gets to thinking, and no matter what you do, you can’t stop it from thinking the things it does.

Right off the start, I’m left thinking a bunch of random thoughts about the whole situation. A horrible man who hated Americans, just because they were Americans, is now finally dead, reportedly killed by a group of Navy Seals. As I have no reason to doubt the events that took place, I am left with a bit of concern as we went through a lot of work to get rid of the body really, really fast. But I’m going to assume everything went as planned, although it did seem a bit odd to have done the whole “burial at sea” thing without a grandstanding of parading the dead body through Ground Zero first. But I’ll just leave it at that.

What does bother me is the hoo rah’s that are going around by average Americans, including someone who sent out an email to people stating something to the effect of “thank God for protecting America and for blessing us with Navy Seals.” Or something like that. Now, I’m not one to rain on a parade, but I really hope that if there is a god, that god isn’t really going out of his way to make it easy for Americans to kill people for revenge, even if it is the right thing to do. I was as angry as every other American after 911, but something feels really wrong to be celebrating the death of anyone, no matter how bad he is.

You see, part of me wishes for the redemption of man and mankind. When bad people do really bad things, I’m not tied up in a sense of Christian revenge, but if I have to take a page from Christianity, I would like to think that the ultimate redemption of a bad person is probably the best revenge. We seem very tempted by the desire to achieve vengeance in all things, and you can see that in so many things that we do, including our tendency to build more prisons than we build schools. Rehabiliation is rarely our goal; instead, we want to make people pay for their crimes. Sometimes, we’re like the Roman Empire in how it deals with those who trespass against them. Rather than punish the transgressor, we tend to go after the transgressors family, friends, his dog Skippy and anyone who might live on the same block. We use the word collateral damage as an afterthought, and years ago stopped answering for it as an excuse or as an apology. Much like Rome, if this is the tactic we want to take, we need to understand that it has to play to its logical conclusion. We either destroy all of our enemies, including those who are friends of our enemies, or we become destroyed ourselves. The whole idea of “rebuilding Afghanistan” makes little sense if we’re a country that understands only revenge. What we should have done was lay waste to Afghanistan, chase down any of their friends to their eventual deaths and then park an aircraft carrier off their coast to make sure they never join the rest of humanity again. That’s the Roman way, and if we’re going to celebrate like Romans, we need to be a lot more like them.

But I don’t think we want to be the Romans. We have a president in office who is supposedly trying to achieve “peace” in the world, especially in places where we seem to be exacting vengeance upon our enemies. I don’t think we’ve figured out exactly what it is we really want to do. When our enemies, like Al Qaeda, put on Pakistani clothing at night after returning from their day job as a harbinger of terror against all things America, it’s pretty hard to try to achieve a sense of friendship with the same people who have no desire to ever be friends in their lifetimes. But we keep trying to play both sides of the fence, and we’re not very good at doing that.

In all, I’m disappointed that the end to our conflict wasn’t eventual peace and friendship, and maybe a learning moment for some people. The realist in me realizes that maybe such conclusions just aren’t possible. But the little guy inside me that still hold onto hope thinks that we’re doing this all wrong, that perhaps there’s a better way that doesn’t involve either killing someone or being killed by someone. Unfortunately, in our good/bad choice paradigm of American understanding, I don’t think we’re capable of seeing alternative pathways to future avenues of prosperity. For too long, we’ve existed in the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” universe. Honestly, George W. Bush didn’t start that thought process. We’ve been living under that delusion since we first pretended to be Native Americans and threw British tea into the Boston harbor. I don’t thik we’re capable of thinking any other way.

But as an American, I have to feel a sense of “we got our enemy yesterday”, and perhaps leave it at that. As a veteran, I’m proud of what our trained soldiers accomplished. As an American who hated what he observed nearly a decade ago, I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment was made here. However, as someone who secretly wished that the world might one day be a better place, I’m afraid we’re continuing to move further and further away from that ever happening.