I suspect that the death of Osama bin Laden will be one of those “I remember where I was when” moments, kind of like the OJ Simpson verdict and the announcement that Rage Against The Machine was getting back together.
I was in a restaurant in Culver City, drinking a beer with my brother. As the news of bin Laden’s death beamed down from an elevated television, a hush settled over the crowd. What came next was anything but quiet. It started when we left the restaurant and saw people celebrating while watching a different television. It continued in cities across the United States as jubilant men and women celebrated the demise of the world’s most wanted man.
Many people have said that this celebration was justifiable. I thought it was sad.
Our brains are hardwired in simple, animalistic ways. A man wants to have sex with every attractive woman who crosses his path. A driver wants to get out of his car and club the man who cut him off in traffic. A woman wants to judge the Mexican man in front of her at Home Depot because he can’t figure out the self-checkout line.
What makes us enlightened – what makes us human, I would argue – is the ability to override this hardwiring.
As soon as the news of bin Laden’s killing was released, many Americans – whether black or white, liberal or conservative – were united in celebration. Any deviation from that celebration was questioned; the attitude seemed to be that this, finally, was one thing we could all agree on. Osama bin Laden was bad, and having him die was good.
Tossing aside some obvious rebuttals (that good vs. bad depends a lot which side you’re on, and that it could easily be argued that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for far more civilian deaths than Osama bin Laden [between 100,000 and 1,000,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan, depending on whose estimates you use]) the core of the matter is this: revenge is not a progressive action.
Most people say that they don’t care – that this was the case of an obvious wrong being righted. Those people forget that what we are discussing is DEATH. American leaders made the moral judgment, without the help of a jury trial or an impartial judge, to kill a man. This means that this human being is gone forever. It’s not a video game or a movie. His life is over.
Rejoicing because another man no longer draws breath is offensive to anyone who believes in human progress, in the sense that “progress” can’t possibly entail “killing each other”. Also, this tit-for-tat methodology doesn’t, well, work. In fact, by killing another man so summarily, we have, in all likelihood, made our enemies madder. Fighting violence with more violence has never worked, will never work.*
The above conclusions are far from ground-breaking; smart people know these things. Which was what made the consensus all the more disappointing. Even our most liberal** minds were swept up in the fervor. One had to look hard for dissenting opinion. (It warms this ex-athlete’s heart that one of the more enlightened/consistent responses came from a professional basketball player.)
There are those who, when reading the preceding 530 words of a rather dry and stern admonition, might react by saying, “Hell, Paul, who cares? You said it yourself: it’s natural for us to feel this way. So let us have our fun.”
To those people, I would say this:
Fine. You’re right. That feeling of relief, of unification against a common enemy, of satisfaction was natural. And my theory – this whole enlightenment thing – goes out the window if progress is not our goal as humans. If, in fact, everyone is okay with reacting to the first instinct that goes whizzing through peoples’ brains, none of this makes much sense. But in that case, it means bringing back a whole bunch of concepts we’d like to keep buried: concepts like misogyny, racism, and discrimination.
It’s not always wrong to give into base instincts. We could all use to be a bit more childlike and animalistic in our enjoyment of beauty and in the pleasure we derive from life.
But when the base instinct comes from the dark place where the need for revenge lurks, it’s worth stepping back and engaging the human brain we’ve worked so hard to develop.
____
*All of this is particularly interesting when viewed in the context of religion. Specifically, Christianity. I am neither a fan of nor a student of religion in general, but I do know that one of the central tenets of Christianity is forgiveness. In an era when people are quick to trumpet to others that the United States was built by Christians, for Christians, it seems important to remind those folks of what Christianity entails. Of course, if we dive down that rabbit hole, we have to explore the paradox that is the fact that many of our country’s most religious people are also its most patriotic. (Love thy neighbor, indeed.) And this is a mere footnote.
**As a young man who enjoys wrestling with intellectual thought from time to time (sometimes clumsily), it remains one of life’s great disappointments that “liberal” thinking now defines thinking related to a certain political party, as opposed to what said young man was sold on, which was that liberal thinkers thought liberally (freely) and, thus, were open to entertaining opinions that might be opposite their own and/or weird.
For more from Paul, click some of the fun buttons below…
Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow him on Twitter.
To befriend him on Facebook.
To send him an email.
I suppose I am in the minority, too. I have no idea where the hell I was when I got the news that Osama was dead – I just remember thinking that a friend of mine was going to be pissed because a joke she does depended on us never finding him. That was about the total energy I expended on thinking about it initially. Then revisited a trip I took to NYC shortly after 9/11 (9/13) to volunteer – to feed the need to do something. And I saw the way this horrible, horrible thing brought so many of us together. So many people I would never expect to unite were embracing, comforting, even praying with one another. And, of course, there were the asshats with megaphones screaming about the Lord’s judgement. I remember thinking “it is sad that it takes something this horrible to bring people together.” It didn’t take long for that to change and we the people to get back to hating anyone that was different from us.
I’ve had that same thought since Osama has been killed. Our regularly scheduled hate will return shortly.
I feel like the argument over OBL’s death is in the wrong place. It’s either “Fuck yeah that SOB deserved to die b/c of 9/11″ (everyone forgets the first WTC bombing) or “we should not be in a place to decide who lives and dies and we definitely should not celebrate death”. What about the impact it has on the war against terrorism? OBL was a figurehead and rallying point for many jihadists (sp?). His death further disorganizes Al Qaeda and definitely improves our stature in the war against terrorism. We should not celebrate death but I was happy to know the US is making strides in the Afgan/Pakistan region.
Finally, how lucky was the American population to have a villain with an Arabic name as easy as Osama Bin Laden? Good luck pronouncing Ayman al-Zawahiri.
i see your point, however i think youre opening a big ol’ can of worms lol.
good luck Paul!
I was not swept up in the fervor.
For the first time, Paul – even with all the *ahem* controversial things you’ve said over the years – I cannot agree with any of what you said. If you are bullshitting us purely for publicity, fine… I can deal with that. It’s the second possibility – that you actually believe what you wrote – that I find egregious.
Can’t you sympathize with others enough to understand that they could have been affected by 9/11 in any number of ways, and that this was a cathartic moment for them? In terms of that catharsis, even if we captured OBL to stand trial, it’s likely the same thing would have occurred. It wasn’t, therefore, a death that was being celebrated as much as an end to unfinished business. Either way, just being in a crowd and experiencing a seminal moment such as this would have been enough for most people to be carried along. If you and your brother weren’t having a good time that night, I can see why you would resist the urge to go with the crowd, but it doesn’t mean you have to call others ‘reptilian’ for their reaction.
Still, do you not feel as if OBL was accurately characterized by the majority of all races and creeds spanning the globe to be a ‘bad’ person? A very small subset of people held an opposite view, of course, but even most Muslims considered him to be anything but a hero. The simple truth is that bad people deserve to be punished, or else they (and those that are influenced by them) do not learn that the things they do are, in fact, bad.
This capacity for forgiveness you wax philosophical about… doesn’t it have limits? If your brother walks up to you and punches you in the face, do you forgive him? How about if he does it again? Again? Again? How about 2,752 times? During the course of such an onslaught, do you think it might occur to you that it would be fair to punch him back?
It’s certainly admirable to want to be an intellectual, but this doesn’t mean you should be devoid of emotion. It means that you can think about and discuss things without letting your own emotion sway your opinion. Futuristically speaking, there is no doubt we can better ourselves in multiple ways. But do you really think that ‘evolving’ means we all turn into dispassionate logic-wielding automatons? We should be able to feel AND discuss, not just one or the other.
Look, killing OBL may not solve all the world’s problems, but if you don’t allow people to feel good about the death of a plot-hatching mass-murderer, what do you allow them to feel good about?
“Fighting violence with more violence has never worked, will never work”
WW2 was violence in response to violence and I think that turned out pretty well.
You Sir are no intellectual. And I say this as a card carrying true far left liberal. Your juvenile reasoning makes us all look bad. Please stop. Why do you even write on this site? It doesn’t seem to be commercialized in any way, so I doubt you are getting paid. Why make a fool of yourself for free?
couldn’t agree more with scott L.
to anyone – you might feel differently if you lived in NYC or were raised in NY like some of us. some mass murderer is dead – don’t expect me to shed tears about it – especially when that person was the reason for so much civilian loss of life and family/friends of people we live next to every day.
i’m not saying run out into the streets, chug beer and yell “fuck yeah!”. but it’s ok and human to be a LITTLE encouraged by the death of such hatred and evil (see: mussolini, hitler, david koresh, jeffrey dahmer..)
WWII was my first thought about violence in response to violence as was Dave’s example.
Perhaps when you have children or nephews and on the chance they get bullied in school you should tell them not to fight violence with violence. I know I was raised by my parents telling me to punch that kid in the face if he hits you, or I’ll hit you… I think I turned out ok.
Do not speak for all of humanity, as I do not have “concepts like misogyny, racism, and discrimination” running through my mind. I do not want to know what you’re thinking about if that is the case.
I like your work for the most part but please get off of your high horse, I was elated when OBL was killed. I still am. We get it; you’re cool, edgy, and better than us all because you prefer that OBL still lived in order to not piss off people who hate us already. As the famous quote from ‘A Time To Kill’ – “Yes [he]deserved to die, and I hope [he] burn[s] in hell!”