I'm sorry I just can't join in on the blood lust I'm seeing displayed here and elsewhere over the killing of Osama bin Laden. One guy, a 911 "family member"/Bush supporter I saw streaming on ABC News, when asked how the news made him feel, described a tingling feeling all over his body. I find that disturbing.
It's not that I'm a pacifist. I own a gun and I would shoot someone who threatened my family. But I wouldn't feel joy from it. I guess my spiritual beliefs just prevent me from ever enjoying the deliberate taking of human life.
I also saw a crowd gathered in front of the white house rah rahing like we had just had all of our fraudulent mortgages paid off. It all seemed staged to me. They all looked like young interns. Reminded me of the Brooks Brother's Riot.
I can't judge anyone though. Osama bin Laden was a psycho who killed a lot of people who were just trying earn a paycheck one morning. So I am sympathetic with the sentiments. Celebrate by all means. But keep in mind who else is celebrating. Here's a short list:
*Wall Street. Anything that keeps them and their continuous pillaging of the Commonwealth off the TV is good news for them. They hoped a good war like Libya was going to do it but the whole foreign war thing is getting really old.
*The Military Intelligence Industrial Complex. This little stunt just gave them the green light to raise the threat levels to HIGH!!! again. God it's been so long since we had that hasn't it. How they've longed for the days when the Congressional checkbook had the Twin Towers printed on it. They needed a big PR show and they've got it now. Expect to see a lot of Neocon retreads make the cable circuit for the next month or so. Terrorism is back baby. It's gonna be a big summer for those General Atomics' stocks (even though no drones were apparently used in the operation, it hasn't stopped a few "analysts" on TV tonight plugging their success).
*Radical Jihadists. Those Jihadists love their martyrs. And we've just delivered them a big one all wrapped in an unmistakably red, white and blue ribbon. As far as I could tell, OBL had become an increasingly irrelevant artifact of the Bush era, hiding out in bunkers, occasionally releasing video tapes, and very much off the minds of the Middle Easterners. I've spent the last three months practically studying the uprisings across the Muslim world and I didn't see OBL or al Qaeda anywhere among those movements.
The only people who think anything good will come of this are fools. It will not, as one guy on C-SPAN said tonight, bring "foreclosure" to the victims of 911. It will not bring peace. And it will not "strike fear into the hearts of our enemies" as one asshole idiot opined.
In fact, you wanna know who very much is not celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden? Hypthetical Gandhi.
Hypothetical Gandhi is the person I look to whenever I'm struck with the question, "What would Gandhi do?" More often than not, this is a difficult question to answer and Hypothetical Gandhi only speaks to me in soft, sometimes unintelligible whispers.
But on this one, it's a slam dunk. "Killing only begets killing."