Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s dead. If you ask me, he got off easy. He should have had to sit in solitary confinement for the rest of his life with nothing but time to reflect on the horrible things he has done.
I hope there’s a hell. I hope he’s burning as you read this. I really do. He deserved it. But don’t look for me in the crowds of people who poured into the streets to celebrate his death; I won’t be there.
The world is a better place because he’s gone, but I don’t think we should celebrate the fact we pulled the trigger.
If I could have written the ending to this story, he’d have been hauled off in handcuffs in front of the world. I love that we caught him. I love that we found him. I don’t love that we killed him.
I have no doubt the SEALs acted in good faith; they would have taken him alive if they could. They had to kill him, but let’s not dance in the streets. It’s beneath us. We’re better than that. “We don’t need to spike the football,” was how the president put it. I agree.
It was undignified to celebrate like we did. Don’t get me wrong, he would never have been so kind. But we’re better than that. It’s what makes us great.
I understand the emotions: relief, pride, closure, justice. I felt it too. It was especially vivid for those of us in our early 20s, we grew up in a 9/11 world. The first time we went to an airport, we had to take off our shoes and cling to our belongings. We were scared. He robbed us of our innocence far too young. Our childhoods were filled with color-coded warnings and mysterious packages with white powder.
He did this to us. He made our world so complex, but he was so simple. It was a brilliant irony we’ll never fully appreciate. He was a cartoon, a caricature of evil. He was the worst of the worst.
Pure and simple, yet so hard to understand – this is the world we grew up in.
I understand the desire to celebrate the victory over evil at a time when we really needed a win, but that doesn’t make it right. By celebrating, we’re not really all that different than the people who cheered the bloodshed on 9/11.
Certainly he deserved it, but that doesn’t make it right to cheer. It’s still a human life, no matter how inhuman he might have acted. We shouldn’t cheer because life and death is above our pay grade. Those decisions are for a higher power, no matter what higher power you believe in. God, Allah, Buddha or Mother Nature. It doesn’t matter; it’s all really the same.
As human beings, we don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. That’s not our job. That’s what made him so terrible, he made the decision to end so many lives. That’s why we hate him. Let’s not cheer for his death. We’re better than that.
I hope there’s a hell. I hope there’s a God. I hope he’s being shown no mercy in the afterlife. I really do. It ought to be painful and unbearable. But we shouldn’t bask in that pain. That’s not what we do. It’s not who we are.
I’m glad we caught him. I love what it says to the fallen, “We have your back.” I love that it tells our enemies that you can’t run forever. I love what this says about justice. I love what it says to the people who believe America is in decline. I love that we didn’t release the photos; he’s not a trophy.
It was a great moment for this country. After ten years, we got our man. I understand that you want to celebrate, but you shouldn’t.
The best way to honor our fallen is to show the world we’re better than him. I couldn’t help think of Toby Ziegler’s story about a Holocaust survivor on The West Wing. The survivor, who was at Auschwitz, came across a man praying in the middle of the camp one day and asked what he was doing. The man responded, “I’m thanking God.”
“Look around you, what are you thanking God for?” the first man asked. He responded perfectly:
“I’m thanking God for not making me like them.”
That’s how I felt last Sunday night. Thank God for not making me like him. The best way to celebrate is to live up to that. We need to be better. We need to be more like the heroes of 9/11, like Todd Beamer and less like the blood-thirsty abominations who planned these attacks.
Let that be the legacy we leave.
