Before anyone pops off and calls me "un-American" or un-patriotic, or calls me out on the myriad of lives lost over the many years that our country's been involved in a war that is, at it's base level, one created from our own cockiness and involvement in world affairs... Let me just say that no matter the transgressions and horrors enacted by one human against another - no matter how terrible and huge, the moment you celebrate the horrific death of that person, it makes you no more evolved than that. It brings you down to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, there are terrible, horrid people in the world. People who do awful things. But at the most basic level, we all need to remember that evil doesn't exist in a vacuum. This is not a Disney movie, where "bad guys" just appear out of nowhere, borne into the world some evil spawn of the devil personified. No, for a moment, consider the tragic circumstances and the awful things that go on each day in order to create an environment where doing horrible things to another human being is considered "ok." Think about how seriously messed up someone has to be in order to think that it's ok to hurt, kill, abuse, or torture another human being. Think about the fact that in order to do these types of things to someone, the perspective and world view must be so fucked up and skewed that it begins to be ok to lose any sense of commonality with a fellow human being. Where it becomes "us" against "them" and we lose sense that we are all striving, at the most basic of levels, for the same thing. To celebrate Osama Bin Laden's death is to turn the losses of all of the human lives into little more than a frat party.
Doesn't it seem hypocritical to anyone - and so ironic - that a country full of self proclaimed Christians (surely you see where I'm going with this) celebrates the death of an "enemy?" If anything, we should be sad, our hearts should be heavy, our thoughts should turn to what we could be doing differently, better, and how we can begin to change our approach. I am of the firm belief that any person who has willfully enacted such harm upon fellow human beings (Mao Ze-Dong, Jozef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Leopold II of Belgium, Hideki Tojo,
Ismail Enver, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Menghistu, Yakubu Gowon, Leonid Brezhnev, Jean Kambanda, Suharto, Saddam Hussein, Tito, Fumimaro Konoe, Jonas Savimbi, Mullah Omar, Idi Amin, Yahya Khan, Benito, Mussolini, Mobutu, Sese Seko, Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh, Michel Micombero, Slobodan Milosevic, Hassan Turabi, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Richard Nixon, Efrain Rios Montt, Papa Doc Duvalier, Rafael Trujillo, Hissene Habre, Chiang Kai-shek, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Francisco Franco, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, Hafez Al-Assad, Khomeini, Robert Mugabe, Rafael Videla, Guy Mollet, Harold McMillans, Paul Koroma, Osama Bin Laden & George W. Bush) would, fundamentally, be damaged to the core, perhaps even physically & psychologically damaged - I can only shake my head and think that something has to be so significantly *wrong* with these people, that it's not a level playing field. It makes me so sad to think about the glorification and celebrations last night - imagine, how adolescent the US must have appeared. "Ding dong, the witch is dead..." any excuse to pour into the streets and crack one open. A far better reaction from our country on hearing the news of his death would have been a somber evening of quiet reflection; reflection on all of the lives lost; the tragic inability of our race to rise above greed and self-serving behaviors; a moment of quiet asking for some larger perspective that would allow us all the ability to work together... and finally, a moment to pause and reflect heartily upon the environment that would allow the creation and grooming of another tyrant in the world's spotlight. We need to be thinking about what we can do to change behaviors so that more people like Osama Bin Laden don't rise up. But before we get too smug, we also need to take a look at the subversive behaviors in our own country.
After I wrote this blog post, my mother in law posted a statement from Venezuelan President Elias Jaua on my Facebook page: "It is surprising to see how normal crime and killing has become and how it is celebrated by imperial governments, although they maintain respect.
Now the death of any individual, that has been accused–and not just elements outside the law like Osama bin Laden, but presidents, the families of a president–are openly celebrated by the heads of governments that bomb...
I believe that in the first place it is an ethical question from the human point of view to celebrate death as an instrument of resolution of a problem."
That's exactly it. Exactly. It's the ethical and moral dilemma of celebrating the proverbial "eye for an eye" that gets me. It's the self-righteous behaviors that somehow vilify certain people, while maintaining some "holier than thou" attitude despite the irony of our government being guilty of the same type of thing! Somehow, it's ok for us to all celebrate Osama's death, but turn a blind eye to the injustices of our own country, and our participation in equally egregious acts? The terror lives here, too. The terror lives on in the fact that human beings are still celebrating death as an option to "fix" what's wrong in the world. It's not ok.
The fact that the climate exists in which a person of such indiscriminate ability to harm fellow human beings is what's disturbing, and the fact that the rest of us celebrate is like celebrating a rabid dog's death. Regardless of necessity, what I'm wanting is the ability of the human race to rise above and evolve. No violent death, regardless of the history, is ever one to celebrate. All that does is lower the humanity of our race. Ultimately, I'm hoping and praying for the spiritual evolution of our human race, to the point where the recipe for disaster doesn't any longer exist.
“Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
Although many are confident that his death will change the climate of world affairs, I suspect it is only the beginning of a new wave. To that end, I hope that everyone finds peace this week. I'll be working on my own little corner of the world, and I hope you can do the same.
** I also found this article on NPR tonight - it's also a good sampling of some of the moral/ethical conundrum...
