Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies!
-A line from the film, Apocalypse Now.
It seems the reasons for celebrating the death of Osama bin laden are manifold:
For some, bin Laden’s name will be inextricably embedded forever in the deepest, most internal synapses of their minds, as part of a deeply felt spectrum of emotions surrounding the deaths of loved ones. I think we can all empathize with those who lost friends and family on that horrible day. Who could find reason to fault them for celebrating the death of bin Laden, as a path to some semblance of closure? To assign ill motives to the survivors of 9/11 would be callous and cruel.
However...
It seems that for some, the reasons for celebration are for other motives:
Based on the flag-waving comments and the associated images of nationalistic jubilation, it is apparent that some are indulging in uncritical, unbridled gloating over what they perceive as a partisan political victory, in complete, blatant disregard for the larger issues surrounding the entire 9/11 response of the United States, including waging a baseless major war, which is a crime in itself of staggering proportions, as well as such egregious, self destructive acts as engaging in torture, allowing those who broke international human rights laws to walk free as near heroes, and violating 4th amendment protections against illegal spying on citizens. And on and on the list of corruption from within our own government goes, all justified by the mere utterance of one or two names: Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda.
We have finally killed the man accused of the 9/11 tragedy, but have we truly won anything to be proud of? Or did his act against us create temporary insanity in America, as we tore a hole in our own national conscience with our willingness to do nearly anything to be able to one day exact vengeance and find a measure of "justice". In the eyes of many sane and well respected citizens, we became a nationwide caricature of an action hero gone wild, a Bruce Willis who bends all laws and tears up an entire city to find the bad guy, all excused due to a national manic episode of post traumatic stress elicited from the intolerable, insufferable, trauma-inducing images we witnessed on that unspeakably gut wrenching day.
This history of 9/11 and what has followed makes me grieve, not just for the 9/11 victims, but for the unprecedented fall from grace that our country has suffered, and for the innocently harmed, for the countless civilian deaths, for the killed and maimed children, for the tortured, for the imprisoned without respect for habeas corpus, for all the crimes of my country against humanity, all done ostensibly in the name of "security," not to bother mentioning some of the other even more ignoble motives at the heart of our militarism and humans rights abuses.
And I'm not sure we'll ever recover from this in the near future. Does anyone really expect Osama's death to bring and end to the horrors and the madness? It seems the new norm is to continue with at least some of the new definitions and justifications of torture, the disregard for human rights, and the willingness to ignore the constitutional protections of our own citizens, so long as security can be invoked to justify it.
I just can't celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, knowing that my country gave up far too much to kill one man.
May our national nightmare be over soon, and may we return to being a civil, tolerant country, to being a member of the lawful international community who respects the conventions against torture and who abides by the desire for non-violence in all of our affairs.
May we become rehabilitated from our crimes. May we become a caring country again. May we heal from our own self-afflicted wounds. May we return to sanity.