Reveling in Death Leaves Us All Blind
I have never identified myself as a pacifist. Nevertheless, I typically revolt against acts of violence of any kind, justified or otherwise. When the news of Osama Bin Laden’s justified killing fell across my computer screen at work, I simply felt emptiness.
Disappointment, however, has replaced this emptiness. Disappointment, sadness, and some anger. The celebrations that poured forth after the announcement from Times Square to university campuses to small towns in the West illustrate an incredibly simplistic view of the current world and situation we live in. The world is not broken down so easily into the dichotomy of good and evil. If we take this road, we only reestablish the unflattering, stereotypical image of America and its citizens as unsophisticated, over-zealos patriots who revel in anything that supports their viewpoint while displacing their responsibility and culpability.
We turn in disgust when we see our fallen soldiers dragged behind cars or burned in a riotous crowd and dismiss it as barbaric behavior. We find fault in dancing crowds who burn our flag and stomp on pictures of our president, our soldiers, and our iconic images. Yet, when the time had come, we decided to commit the same obscenities. Thus, instead of being a beacon of understanding and empathy, our actions these past few days convey arrogance and imperiousness.
For the past ten years, we have missed multiple opportunities to show ourselves and our nation to live up to our declarations of being a great country who embraces diversity, multiplicity, and tolerance. The killing of a major symbolic enemy was another. We did not have to show remorse or regret. We did not have to show sadness or pain. What we did have to show was solemnity and dignity for a situation that was made better because a person had to be killed.
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