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I read the news today, oh boy
May. 2nd, 2011 01:39 pmI'm not sorry to hear Osama bin Laden is dead, but I'm not celebrating.
It feels wrong to cheer for anyone's death. At most, I've got a sense of grim relief, and a dark satisfaction: he can't hurt anyone anymore. At least not personally.
But ideas are more powerful than any one individual, and the ideas Osama proclaimed are still out there. The idea that killing people who don't share your beliefs is a good thing, and worse, that God requires and rejoices in such killing--that vicious belief is still out there. There are others beside Osama who espouse this. On the day of Osama's death, the Taliban used a 12-year-old boy as a suicide bomber. Four civilians died. Five people were murdered by hatred.
A twelve-year-old boy. How can I celebrate? If that boy had known Osama would be killed today, would he still have strapped a bomb to his chest? I'm sure he would have, and that certainty makes me want to weep, or scream.
As a mass murderer, and an inspiration to so many other mass murderers, Osama earned his own death. But it doesn't change anything. Hatred is a hydra; cut off one head and two others grow to take its place. Osama's life may have ended yesterday, but the evil beliefs he shared did not.
So I'll mourn, today, for the 3,000 or so men, women and children who were murdered nearly ten years ago in New York and Pennsylvania. And I'll mourn five people who died in Kabul yesterday, including--no, especially a twelve-year-old boy who never got a chance to learn anything but how to hate.
It feels wrong to cheer for anyone's death. At most, I've got a sense of grim relief, and a dark satisfaction: he can't hurt anyone anymore. At least not personally.
But ideas are more powerful than any one individual, and the ideas Osama proclaimed are still out there. The idea that killing people who don't share your beliefs is a good thing, and worse, that God requires and rejoices in such killing--that vicious belief is still out there. There are others beside Osama who espouse this. On the day of Osama's death, the Taliban used a 12-year-old boy as a suicide bomber. Four civilians died. Five people were murdered by hatred.
A twelve-year-old boy. How can I celebrate? If that boy had known Osama would be killed today, would he still have strapped a bomb to his chest? I'm sure he would have, and that certainty makes me want to weep, or scream.
As a mass murderer, and an inspiration to so many other mass murderers, Osama earned his own death. But it doesn't change anything. Hatred is a hydra; cut off one head and two others grow to take its place. Osama's life may have ended yesterday, but the evil beliefs he shared did not.
So I'll mourn, today, for the 3,000 or so men, women and children who were murdered nearly ten years ago in New York and Pennsylvania. And I'll mourn five people who died in Kabul yesterday, including--no, especially a twelve-year-old boy who never got a chance to learn anything but how to hate.
