How should you respond to the death of a tyrant? Well, I'm not sure how you *should* respond to it, but I'm going to posit that one way you *shouldn't* is through celebration.
Yet, I don't think a lot of people seem to grasp this.
Osama bin Laden was found and killed yesterday (EDIT: he was actually found before Sunday, but a plan to capture/kill him was created to be carried out on Sunday) which, as my mom pointed out, seems rather anticlimactic. A decade after the horror of 9/11 and with bin Laden on the run, as well as the "War on Terror", this one person, who seems to have had little organizational purpose by his end, seems insignificant. Not insignificant in the sense that the crimes he committed were small or un-horrendous, but rather that he seems to have had little significance in terms of power and control in the recent past.
I consider myself, for the most part, a pacifist. Now, this doesn't mean I wouldn't fight in my own defense (or have the occasional wrestling match with my siblings), but I don't believe that anyone "deserves" to be killed. Period. So the idea that people in America are celebrating the death of bin Laden are celebrating, or happy that he's died (rather than happy that he won't be any more atrocities), is somewhat disturbing to me.
Of course, I understand that people who lost loved one in 9/11 might feel happy that bin Laden was gone, in a vengeful way, but since when was vengeance a good thing? Or a thing to be celebrated?
I watched Obama's address yesterday, about bin Laden's death, and what struck me the most was that bin Laden's death was considered "justice". My definition of justice does not include killing, and I felt uncomfortable with the idea that violence was an acceptable form of justice.
Perhaps I view this from a wider angle than simply "Osama bin laden is dead". I think that violence breeds violence, and hate breeds hate. The celebration or willful perpetuation of either of these things will never bring peace (or even relative peace, since I don't believe true piece is actually capable of being attained). To quote Gabrielle (or paraphrase, since I'm terrible at quoting from memory) from Xena "The only way to end the cycle of hate isProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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hrough love." Sounds cheesy, but I think it's also right.
I put the response to bin Laden's death in a larger worldview, because of it's possibly larger implications. There are plenty of (deranged) people who believe any number of people are tyrants. And while bin Laden is recognized as a tyrant by the majority of the world, what's to stop someone else from thinking killing the person *they* believe is a tyrant is acceptable. Maybe that's a stretch, but it's unsettling to me nonetheless.
My recommendation is to go through all of these recommendations and compile them into a list, so that you might actually remember to follow through on them.
I shall part from these words I found on facebook from MLK:
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