I was asleep when those planes hit the towers, and last night when the president announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I was watching Netflix. So I found out this morning on Facebook. I shed a few tears, but I'm not sure what for. Here are the thoughts I have:
Another mess cleaned up by a Democratic president? I suppose I feel a bit gloat-ish about that.
I'm not a vengeful person myself, but now that I have a child, I can understand why some people would be dancing in the street. I also know there are a long series of Post-War policies and actions that have played a part in this, that I am sure Bin Ladin was able to view his actions as justifiable. And vengeance leads to more vengeance, etc. Should this not bring a tear to my eye?
I'm really not trying to get on my moral high ground today; I judge no one for their reaction. Death is not an easy thing to digest. And I guess that is my problem. I don't know what my tears are for, except maybe...
I think a lot about the social and emotional isolation that it must take to create a monster, in general. It's something I think about all the time not just today. What it must take to be willing to throw one's own life away in the name of something seemingly so shallow. Perhaps my tears are not for his death at all, but for his life, for the parts of his life he did not choose and for the parts that he did. Sometimes the only thing to do with a monster is to slay him, sometimes it's just too late, too many people dead, too much suffering.
He was certainly not the only monster that could have died yesterday, but he was the one that did. If I could pray to a god, I would ask that he grant me the ability to look at all monsters with compassion, lest I feed the monster inside me.
I was a bit unsettled by the crowd in front of the white house, a lynch mob came to mind. Not to say I am upset that he was killed. But it seems that any death, whether it is of a monster or an innocent is a somber occasion. For the reasons you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog.
I just read another blog post that I found interesting, although with a religious slant. http://blog.sojo.net/2011/05/02/how-should-we-respond-to-the-death-of-osama-bin-laden/
ReplyDeleteI liked the Solzhenitsan quote. 'As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”'