You Can Dance If You Want To

Pardon my tangent.

Yesterday, a historical event occurred. After decades of plotting and organizing various deadly terrorist activities, including 9/11, and nearly ten years of hiding from the United States, Osama bin Laden was found and killed. Turn your TV on to any channel and you will see the same thing. Americans gathering on the streets of New York, Washington D.C., and countless other cities and towns, celebrating this achievement for America. Naturally, you all already know this because you clearly have the necessary access to the internet required to read these very words, and as far as I know, none of you currently reside under a rock. Needless to say, when the news broke everyone was feeling especially proud to be an American, myself included.

Today, the dust has begun to settle and I feel less than celebratory. I have a raw, unsettled feeling with a side of guilty conscience.

I want to make something very clear. In my mind, Osama bin Laden is the absolute definition of bad guy. The things he did during his time on Earth are unspeakable. If there is a hell, then he is there, no doubt about it.

That being said, he is (was) a human being. And we are celebrating the death of another person. And it just feels weird. Worse, it feels unresolved. Because here's the thing. If you knock a bee hive out of a tree and kill the Queen bee, the other bees aren't going to passively lay down and die, mourning the death of their leader. They're going to attack you, sting the hell out of you, try to inflict as much pain on you as humanly possible, even if it means losing their own lives. And that's just bees.

I can't stop thinking that if this were a movie, bin Laden's death would mean bye-bye Al Qaeda.The troops would all come home to their families and the Middle East would become a place of peace and democracy. We would all be walking amongst the rubble looking like Megan Fox with perfect skin and strategically placed dirt on our extra tight t-shirts, while George Clooney diffused all of North Korea's nuclear warheads. But life isn't a movie, and our actions have consequences.

In the meantime, we continue to celebrate.

For all of the families who lost a loved on on September 11, I hope this brings them some kind of closure, even if it can't bring their family or friends back. As for the rest of us... My brain and heart feel like they're engaged in a civil war. My heart says we should celebrate the fact that the world lost a bad guy. My brain stubbornly insists that we murdered this bad guy because he murdered other people. It's an eye for an eye world, and I just don't know that I can go along with that philosophy. In the meantime, I have this nagging feeling in my gut that my first reaction to murder was happiness and I can't shake it. It doesn't feel good.

I'm proud to be an American. I don't question the decision to kill bin Laden rather than capture him and put him in prison. My knowledge of prison is limited to the plot of The Shawshank Redemption, but any idiot knows that bin Laden would survive about thirty seconds before someone in prison killed him. The fact of the matter is that he was a bad man and the world now has one less bad man.

I just don't want to dance in the street because of it.