Not Exactly Cops and Robbers / 5-2-11

When Osama bin Laden's planes hit those towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania ten autumns ago, he announced himself as Public Enemy Number 1.

He graduated instantly from distant little terrorist nuisance pest dude to The Bad Guy. Deservedly so: He and his followers perpetrated an evil act on 3,000 innocent bystanders. And in the end, whether the mastermind was in fact bin Laden himself or not, that part is of little consequence. Al Qaeda did this to us, one way or another. (Conspiracy theories are fun, but flimsy.)

There is little way to deny that Osama and his minions, in this battle (I hesitate to call it a war), became the bad guys. We were victims of aggression by an evil band of murderers. We watched it happen. We were struck by evil.

But that didn't automatically turn us into the good guys.

We could have seized the moment and been the goodies, as the Brits like to say. Except that 100,000 dead Iraqis -- real, live men, women and children who perished in an subsequent unnecessary war waged under false pretenses at best -- would like to object. If they could.

So when you celebrate the death of a real bad guy, a mass murderer, for sure, see if you can copy me and try desperately to squeeze three competing thoughts in the back of your crowded mind.

One's from a friend of mine who posted this last night on facebook: "Being glad that anyone is dead is still being glad someone is dead."

Then, this gem, pulled from some clever bumper sticker author: "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

At last, something from yours truly: "My opponent's wrongness is not some sort of redemptive purifying elixir that absolves me from making compassionate choices. Sometimes, a conflict might not have any good guys."

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.