Monday, May 2, 2011

You can try to hold the breeze

I slept through the president telling us that bin Ladnn was killed, having gone to bed before the press conference announcement interrupted my viewing of "The Apprentice" documentaries about very intelligent things. I woke to news of a man's death and celebrations of this killing.

I am not saying that he wasn't evil and that he didn't do a lot of really bad things. No, I don't know of an acceptable alternative punishment. And I do hope that there is a sense of some closure for all of his victims and people affected by his attacks. I just find something distasteful about celebrating anyone's death.

I understand feelings of relief or revenge-completed. But celebrating a death, to me, is crossing a line, no matter who the death is. It takes away from our humanity a bit. There's just something gross about choosing to celebrate the end of anyone's existence. It starts to let you draw a circle around the deaths you can celebrate. Did they kill 100 people? Did they kill 10? Did they cut you off in traffic? Were they just kind of annoying? I know that's an extreme, but I don't want to start making those judgments.

I applaud that it's been done. I hope that, as a nation, we can start moving forward and start fixing other things that are broken. But I will not celebrate that someone has died, no matter the person.

1 comment:

Tracy said...

I am frequently surprised by how alike we seem to think.