Thoughts on the death of Osama bin Laden:
I am bemused and confused. A bad man is dead as a result of our intense intent and a chorus arises with cheers; can we know peace while celebrating murder? We bring death to a killer who was motivated by hate and count it as a prize. We raise the status of those we abhor to martyr while stilling the breath from tens (some say hundreds) of thousands of civilians in our pursuit of retribution. Perhaps what we hate the most is what we are most likely to become. We exact and extract a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye and then smile with pride; in our blindness, can we appreciate a toothless grin?
We can always paint an allegory or analogy that that makes us look better in the shadow of our own darkness; those that live by hate do the same thing, yet it never makes the world more beautiful.
I am speculating that in killing a great evil we are not very different from the evil we despise. I understand that some people believe that good killing evil is a righteous thing and that it makes the world a better place. In fact, many various individuals and groups of people are convinced their cause is good, even holy; they in turn use that validation to commit murder and other crimes. Isn’t that what the evil man did? In addition, the death of one evil becomes fertilizer on the sprouts of more evil. Perhaps I am alone in this, but I think we need to plant different seeds and find other ways to nourish them. I am guessing that is the only way we will ever harvest fruit from a garden of peace.
Please understand that I in no way support the philosophy or actions of Osama bin Laden. I am also not particularly saddened by his death. What I am saying would equally apply to him and his group; his evil did not spring from thin air. Those actions came from proclaiming war on what he perceived to be evil. The actions that motivated him were done by others in an attempt to overcome evil. It is a cycle that will only escalate if we continue to feed it. When do we get so sick from the spinning that we demand the merry-go-round be stopped?
