With a Vengence

I can celebrate death. Fully, and absolutely. I can celebrate every time a piece of insanity or the bringer of mass death and irrational fear is blasted out of our consciousness. And I will celebrate. As a species, it’ll take a lot of time before we move along peacefully and together. Actually, odds are we’ll never get to a point where respect, peace, and progression are not dreams, but the fundamental values that billions of haphazard people embrace collectively. Big odds. We as a people are the long-shot on the outside rail.

And whatever your beliefs on who started all this (because, to me, it’s simplistic to say 9/11 was a first strike. The whole issue of modern terrorist warfare is such a weird millennial long-term religious level fight that to act like they broadsided us, or the opposite, is just a strange and convenient perversion of history. Although that being said, targeting random civilians hasn’t been our game in the past half-century, and for some it has), there’s one thing we should all agree on: murderous insanity will get us nowhere. We regress every time fear is used to make a point or push a belief. Regress in the greatest sense. This is true on every side and on every angle.

The most non-pious related reason I ever heard for why Bin Laden launched his attacks (and don’t get me started with the conspiracy theory bullshit: If you want I can dispatch of that argument in a different essay, and with much more ease) was that the U.S. established military bases in (specifically) Saudi Arabia.

Well shit, wouldn’t it be nice if life was so easy that you could use buildings you didn’t agree with as an acceptable reason to launch strikes of mass-death? Anything else bothering you Mr. Bin Laden? Is ABC’s daytime schedule falling a little short? Has Drew Carey proved an unacceptable replacement to Bob Barker? Is there a new Walgreen's down the block that you can’t stop with civics?

I mean, what country doesn’t have a U.S. airbase on it? But the reality is, Bin Laden fights a religious war, and as Gus Avarkotos would say: “America doesn't fight religious wars. That's why I like living there.”

And although it may not be entirely true, the concept is at least mostly true, and at the very least, much more true than in circles like those that Bin Laden strove to cultivate. We at least strive to live up to that quote, or at least the best of us do.

I think to some degree it all boils down to medieval people trying to drag us into a medieval war over values that are becoming trivial in the scientific age we’re emerging into. Not that secular people understand death anymore then religious people on any side (far from it), but at least the framework for the discussion is more open on the secular side. It’s why I cringed when the president ended his “I Killed Bin Laden” speech (which will go into a file along with other great speeches as he builds his case for the best public speaker of the century), with saying God bless this and that about four times.

Some people will interpret that God as a certain Christian God. And why wouldn’t they? But we need to take all of that as far out of the equation as we can, and if nothing else, let’s try to get past God blessing any particular nation. God bless the world is fine with me; If we need to get God involved in any count at all.

Fuck Osama Bin Laden. Fuck him, and people that are fine with random mass-death for any theoretical reason. And I mainly write this in response to an article that was on CNN asking whether it was right to celebrate the death of someone. Anyone.

You’re god damned right it is. We should celebrate the death of Bin Laden as we would the creation of new vaccine or the discovery of a distant solar system: it is, however symbolic and small, another step towards a society that doesn’t live in fear and will never except random civilian punishment by weak-minded terrorism. Just because we caught up to him a decade later, don’t forget how awful the original movie was, and don’t stand on some obtuse hipster moral high-ground just to be different from the thoughts of the world.

Insanity holds no such distinction when it is unleashed viciously on a global-scale. And although severe repression can be an excuse for making an impression, ideology can only do the same in the most brutal of circumstances. Circumstances that I don’t think we’ve even come near, and circumstances that someone of Bin Laden’s ilk wouldn’t have taken the time to consider anyway.

It seems counter-intuitive that peace can slowly come from the evisceration of life, and it’s commendable when any society would even take the time to consider this aspect of the attack on Bin Laden in spite of the horror he created.

At some point we’ll need to quit this rotation of revenge, but not on this day, and not with this guy.

Most of us are more than happy to stop fighting over ideological and religious bullshit that comes from sources that are more ridiculous with every passing thought. And for those who aren’t, and specifically for those who hope for more random bloodshed for their vision of an afterlife that’s impossible to confirm; know that there are those of us that will come after you and hold you accountable for the loss of life you create on these grounds.

And every time we succeed, we will celebrate.