Osama Bin Laden is dead. He was utter scum, and I believe the world is a better place without him. However, now the entire country is celebrating and acting like a decade of unnecessary death, destruction, and unwarranted murder at the hands of OUR government was justified and the correct thing to do. Was killing this one man worth losing more than twice as many Americans as were killed in the initial attacks? Is the fact that it took a DECADE to find a guy who was living less than a mile from an American military base something to celebrate? Is celebrating the death of this man all that different than the way he celebrated when the towers fell on that dark day?
The man wasn't Hitler. He didn't have a massive army, or dangerous weapons, or allies, or ANYTHING that made him a threat. He resorted to terrorism because terrorism was all he had. The fact is that the entire purpose of his initial attacks was to get us to react EXACTLY how we reacted. They couldn't hope to hurt us on our own soil, so they lured us to theirs. The loss of life on September 11, 2001 was a great tragedy. Our reaction to it as a country was an even greater one. The moment we began attacking foreign soil to get to him, we became, in the eyes of many, the very monsters he claimed we were. Now, a decade later, we have lost so many lives in the name of this War on Terror that any victory feels hollow to me. I can’t say for sure that we would never have lost them if that war hadn’t been started, but I believe that we wouldn’t have. If our enemies had more effective weapons, they would have used them. If they could have killed more than 2600 people they would have. The fact remains that on that day, they did their very best to cripple our country, and they succeeded only in wounding us. Far more damage has been done by our continued pouring of resources into conflict after conflict than was done in that initial battle, and all attempts by the Taliban since to do more damage to America have failed to even come close to the same level of destruction caused by those original attacks. We pose a far greater threat to ourselves than they ever posed to us, and that is EXACTLY what terrorism is supposed to do. They won that battle.
Now, as we sit here, having finally accomplished the killing of the man who started the mess, we could, as a country, use this moment to back away, to stop overexerting ourselves in a war against a concept that by its very nature is unstoppable, but no. Our government is already talking about this as if it's not over. They're already saying that we have lots more work to do. They're already prepared to commit even more time, money, and LIVES to a cause that serves no purpose for America, while we continue to ignore real potential threats. Will they go ahead with this, or will they make the saner choice? Only time will tell, of course, but given the past, I think it’s fairly easy to guess. I'm glad that the families of those who died finally have some closure, but this is NOT a good thing for our country. Instead of learning that blindly lashing out at anyone who hates us is foolish and destructive to everyone involved, we will become even more committed to throwing ourselves into senseless violence. I'm not playing Devil's advocate. I hated the man as much as any of us. I don't want to debate this, and I'm not trolling, but... no. I'm not happy at all.
There is a country on this planet that has rampant crime, poverty, disease, and an upper class that lords over it all in decadence and luxury. This country is constantly swinging its weight around, and despite being far from perfect itself, it has decided to pass judgment on other people’s ways of life. It reaches far and wide, having the sheer audacity to impose occupation and demands on countries that it has nothing to do with, and all under the guise of helping. We, the American citizens, have the power to stop this country in its tracks without ever firing a single shot or losing a single life, if only we stand up for what is right. We now live in a world where the price doesn’t matter as long as the goal is accomplished, and where death and destruction and hatred are celebrated in the streets. We claim to be purveyors of freedom, helping less fortunate parts of the world find peace and prosperity, when on our own soil, people are still murdered EVERY DAY for being different in such small ways as skin color and who they fall in love with. This is not only hypocritical, it’s utterly disgusting. At this time, we have no right to claim superiority over anyone, much less a society that is only as wrong as we once were ourselves.
Today, almost everyone in the country is celebrating the death of a villain. I’m mourning the seemingly fatal disease infecting the country I grew up loving and believing in. I beg you, as a man who loves his country, do not raise your glass to the death of this man. Do not celebrate this as a victory. Instead, hang your head in memory of his victims. Let this be, instead of a celebration of violence and revenge, a time to reflect on what we have done in the past as a country, and what has been done to us in return. Would they ever have hated us enough to attack had we not been so smug as to meddle again and again in the affairs of other countries? Would they ever have been so opposed to us that they were willing to die to make us suffer had we not been so arrogant as to think that we had the right to decide how the rest of the world ran? I don’t know. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and those things are unchangeable, fixed in our past. The future, however, is ours to mold. We can either take this time to reflect upon the mistakes of the past, learn from them, and change our course while we still have time, or we can keep heading, and sail our ship into territory we know for a fact to be hostile and dangerous.
I wasn’t sure whether or not I should post this. I know that many of you will be angry, and that I’ll receive negative thoughts from more than a few. I know that almost everyone who sees these words will know of my argumentative nature, and many will believe I’m going against the grain either for the sake of doing or simply because I enjoy arguing. That is not the case. I don’t want to argue, or debate, or even discuss this much beyond these words. I’m doing this because I grew up loving my country, genuinely trusting and believing that I lived in the greatest place in the world, and because now, that country, that land that I am patriotic about and love desperately, is wrong. It’s not only dying out, it has died. The Patriot Act was the first in a number of assaults on my perception of the country we live in, and the reaction to the death of one man was the final one. We have to stop this now, before it’s too late. We still have time to save this country, but not much time. Not much at all. Stand with me, and make our country free, truly free, for perhaps the first time. Let the government know that you don’t want this cycle of violence to continue. Enough blood has spilled.
