Bin Laden

Am I the only one disturbed by the open-mouthed glee shown in the media at the news of Osama bin Laden's death? Is no one else reminded of the tasteless rubbing of the US flag in the face of the statue of Saddam during the Iraq war? Am I alone in the finding the display almost adolescent and lacking in good manners? Surely we are more mature than this as a country?

No one denies the horror of 9/11 nor the provocations provided by bin Laden's terror group. But he'd been silent of late, showing up in videotape every once in a while like Marley's ghost to shake his chains and threaten death and damnation. I considered the Taliban, with its murderous treatment of women, its diffused terror cells, and its appeal to religious fanaticism to be far more relevant. In this new world of horror, bin Laden had become a side issue, a non sequitur, at best a mere symbol while the real damage was being done elsewhere.

My reaction to his death? No jubilance, I assure you. My thoughts go to the 6000 lives, the billions of dollars, and the political posturing we had to endure to catch this one man. I also think about how little this is going to mean in terms of the terror. The killing won't stop. The flow of our national resources out of the country won't stop. Our armies will not come home any sooner. Other, smaller terror units will take up the slack of violence, like the Greek myth of the multi-headed hydra: you cut off one head and two more grow. So we caught and killed Osama bin Laden--so what is different today than it was yesterday?

Instead of such jubilance and glee, surely we would have been better off bowing our heads for the lives lost on 9/11 and the thousands since. What we see in the media is mere revenge. I would like to think we were more thoughtful and self-aware than that.