Mission fucking accomplished
I reacted strangely to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. I was not inspired to dance in the streets, but I was also not inspired to post quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on my Facebook page. While I don’t think that one man’s death is ever a cause for jubilation, I guess it’s impossible to have any kind of nuanced discussion about this in the American political climate. And maybe I would feel differently had I been personally affected by the attacks of 9/11/01.
A friend of mine, a much wiser person than I, said, ‘The more we celebrate one man’s death, the more power we give to his legacy.’ I couldn’t agree more. You can apply this statement to Jesus or Malcolm X or Hitler and it still bears out. Maybe some people think it’s fitting to cheer about the death of a man who has been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of so many others. Pumping young men and women full of hate to fight a meaningless ‘war’, immolating themselves in the name of a religion he didn’t even practice–it’s all pretty sickening. But was this all worth it? The overriding goal, it seems, of the past ten years of my life, has been for the United States to ‘win the war on terror’ by killing bin Laden. A questionable goal by way of questionable methods–invading two countries, unjustly, at a tremendous cost to civilian lives…and for what? To shoot a guy in the head and dump his body in the ocean? Can we please pull our dicks out of the Middle East now?
I didn’t know who bin Laden was before 9/11/01. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was. I didn’t really pay attention to the news–so in a weird way, this past decade has seen my transformation from oblivious teenager to, I flatter myself, a semi-savvy consumer of media and world events. It’s strange to wake up to a Middle East where there’s no Saddam Hussein, no Osama bin Laden, and (possibly, soon) slightly fewer dictators. But I don’t expect any “good” to come from all this death, even the death of evil men. I may be too cynical, but the way things stand now I can’t imagine a Middle East (I guess I’m sort of including North Africa and Central Asia in this as well) without strife, without stultifying anti-woman religious fanaticism, without the United States turning a blind eye to the lack of development and human rights abuses in the pursuit of oil. Perhaps I would feel better (or feel something) about bin Laden’s death, and the Iraq war, and the Afghanistan war, if any of this suffering meant that one day it would be different.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.