My internet connection here is shoddy, so I can't provide video evidence, but take a look at news footage showing the streets of cities in the Middle East on September 11th. Look how they cheer, wave flags, celebrate, chant. Now take a look in front of the White House today, or in the streets of New York. Don't these scenes look disturbingly similar? Are we really so base that the death of one person can throw our country into such jubilee? How are we better than the primitives we fight against by cheering this on?
Don't get me wrong... I certainly feel some sense of vindication, maybe even closure that the person is dead. But as a dead person, he acts no more. He no longer has the ability to make something of his life. Instead, those living are the ones making him so big and important. If you are vengeful and angry at the pain he has caused our country and the world, why not deliver the ultimate insult by forgetting him? He is nothing more than a hiccup in our planet's history. Don't glorify him by praising your deity that he's been killed.
Have you ever stomped on a cockroach? Or sprayed a spider with Raid? What did you do afterwards? Did you take to the streets and play bagpipes and wave flags and shoot fireworks and sing? Or did you scrape the mess off your floor and go about your day like nothing happened, perhaps slightly happier to know there's one less bug in your house? Wouldn't the greatest insult conceivable be to relegate this man to the backwaters of our memory as one of the countless other cockroaches we have smashed?
I've quoted it before and I'll do it again: Let us "live above the common level of life." Let us never sully our tongues with his name. And let us celebrate not that he is dead but that we continue living, and that our way of life is intact.
Mr. President, I applaud your administration for doing what the last administration couldn't - whether you deserve the credit or not, I'm giving it to you. But let's not make this a "momentous occasion." Can we control our feelings of revenge and satisfaction and schadenfreude? No. But we can at least differentiate ourselves from the savages we are fighting by controlling our behavior.
In summary:
1. Never celebrate death. It is at once too grave and commonplace to ever be celebrated.
2. Don't add meaning to a bad person's life by adding meaning to his death.
