I’m coming out of retirement for one last score a message that is pretty important to me, and that I am apparently too chicken to deliver to the world at large any way but anonymously. I swore that I would make no political statements on this blog, but I can’t restrain myself.
When I heard that Osama bin Laden was dead, I did not feel joy. I did not feel a sense of triumph or victory or relief or pleasure. I felt nothing.
I have grieved over 9/11, and the subsequent major alterations to daily life in America, in my turn. I have done that work. I have given the event and its repercussions (so far…they will be vibrating on for decades to come) enough thought, as far as I can tell from here. I was as horrified as anyone else at what suddenly existed when I woke up that morning, and what existed the following morning, and the morning after.
But I will never feel any pleasure at the death of another human. No matter what he has done. That is a dangerous road.
The only response from a world leader that I liked was that of the Vatican:
“Osama bin Laden, as we all know, had the very grave responsibility of spreading division and hatred amongst the people, causing the death of countless of people, and of instrumentalizing religion for this end. In front of the death of man, a Christian never rejoices but rather reflects on the grave responsibility of each one in front of God and men, and hopes and commits himself so that every moment not be an occasion for hatred to grow but for peace.”
I am no Catholic, but I find this appropriate and largely correct.
This morning, I heard on the radio that one of my state’s senators said that she felt relief of the same caliber as when she was a little girl and her parents told her that Hitler was dead. I also heard a jokey bit juxtaposing Obama’s announcement speech with the song “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. I said, aloud, “This does not become you.”
It’s not flattering, America, to be dancing on graves. It’s not the way forward. Death does not equal justice; that philosophy leaves the whole world dead.
And, you know, aside from all this finger-shaking I have to do (this is a very high horse, up here, helloooooo), I feel the need to point out logically that this does not suddenly undo the last ten years. A father who lost his twenty-three-year-old son in the World Trade Center said in a well-taken opinion piece that this does not bring his son back. Nor, in my opinion, does it right the wrongs of Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, wiretapping, and all the divisiveness, partisanship, and religious hatred that has inflamed your country and mine during the last decade. Nor does it somehow lift the black cloud of paranoia and directionless fear that has settled upon us, seemingly with permanency. We were looking for something to make us safe again, I suppose, and people have settled on the death of this man as the event that activates that forcefield. Now we are safe.
No, it doesn’t work like that. Whatever Osama bin Laden wanted to do to our country and our way of life, he has done. He and his ilk succeeded too long ago for his death to carry much meaning for me. I feel no safer today than I did yesterday. But that’s because my sense of safety does not depend on who lives and dies in a cult of fanatics halfway around the world; it depends on whether I decide to leave my house in the morning.
We can stay inside forever, and be safe, or we can go outside, and be free, and damn all the torpedoes, planes, and thieves of freedom – both physical and psychological – who might cross our paths. It’s not up to a bearded man in a desert land to die so that we can be safe. It’s up to us to make ourselves free.
