Ladenfreude / 5-2-11

Watched President Obama last night announce the capture and death of Osama bin Laden.

Then read up on what others had to say -- journalists, friends, strangers.

Is there a word for less-than-glad, yet highly relieved, with equal parts excitement and disbelief? There should be. That's what I am, so the word is required.

Less-than-glad is not exactly what these people, or these people, or even these people, are. (And that last one's from stuffy old NPR's facebook page.)

Yet... I just can't bring myself to dance on a grave, because no matter which bones lie in that coffin, the fact remains that if you look down, you find that you're still dancing on a grave.

That having been said, if we're being honest here, and now is as good a time as any to start with a truth-based strategy, I'm actually quite relieved. Not happy, mind you. Just relieved that a mass murderer is no longer free to let his particular brand of hate loose on the world. Quite relieved that bin Laden will never again strike my country. I exhaled all last night.

At the same time, adrenaline kicked in the instant I received the news alert. This bad guy, this mass murderer of people of every ethnicity and religious stripe, he's finished, and it's a f*cking big deal. W called it a "momentous achievement."

To boot, it doesn't feel real. Maybe because Al Qaeda has been on a decentralization kick as of late, at least according to most counter-terrorism experts, including Jack Bauer, so the news doesn't exactly spell the end of organized terrorism anyway.

I kid, I kid with the cheesy "24" reference, but when you spend a day sleeping in, doing yard work, watching baseball, and reading in the sun, your system just might reject serious news that forces it to revisit the last ten ugly years of world history. Did this really just happen?

Still looking for that catch-all word to sum up what I'm feeling. Good luck with that, self.