Seth Meyer, Bin Laden, Obama
During the Washington correspondents' annual dinner on Saturday, Seth Meyers, chief writer for Saturday Night Live gave a speech. One the jokes (at 2:05) of the YouTube link below was "People think Bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Bush, but everyday for 4-5 he hosts a show on CSPAN" Note the president chuckling right after the joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YGITlxfT6s
To "thechampaignlife": I
To "thechampaignlife": I didn't personally whoop and holler, but I don't mind anyone who did. For me it felt more like a relief. Earthly justice is understandable and heavenly justice is beyond that realm.
I would say though, that if you'd captured, tortured and finally had cut off my soldier son's head slowly with an electric carving knife,,,,,,,,,,I wouldn't weep at your demise.
If you had masterminded the plot to train suicide volunteers over a period of years to hijack and fly jets into U.S. targets, and had succeeded beyond your expectations, and were shown on video so gleeful,,,,well,,,,,I wouldn't weep at your demise.
Lest my examples ring of hatred,,I don't mind if they do. However, that is not paramount in my thinking, which is: I see no way other than using violence in dealing with people who wish me dead because I do not believe in their religion, a religion which commands that non-believers be exterminated!
Regards,
There's a big difference
There's a big difference between not weeping at an evil person's demise and celebrating the death. I agree that Sunday's outcome was justified and unavoidable but I take no solace in ANY person's death. I take solace in the end of a person's evil insomuch as I would had he been imprisoned or turned into a do gooding Mother Theresa. I'm concerned too much focus is paid to "how great we Americans are because we killed someone who hurt us" and not enough is paid to "what can we do to mitigate the risk of inciting future violent". An eye for an eye makes for blind men and let us have the man who is without sin cast the first stone at our enemies. It's certainly not what Jesus would do.
Champaignlife - I have to say
Champaignlife - I have to say that when I first heard the Operators nailed him, my very first gut feeling was that I was happy. Without time to sit back and think about it... it wasn't necessarily true joy, but it was like, say, the feeling one gets watching a home run sail over the fence. Some pride, some relief.
Watching people run around in the streets though struck me as odd.
For my two cents, it represents a sort of Pyrrhic Victory. Bin Laden got exactly what he wanted, which was to throw the West into a state of chaos. Look at what we have to go through to get on an airplane. He brought our economy down for a while. He lured the U.S. into a ground war or two or three in Asia. He accomplished his goal, but it cost him a hole in his head and landed him at the bottom of ocean in a weighted bag. So congratulations, I guess.
Should we be running around waving flags and slapping high fives? Maybe not so much. But should I pity the man, or feel remorse because he's gone, or do I feel like anything that I could have done would have stopped him from being the person he became? Not for a millisecond. There is no mitigating terrorism or evil.
Am I the only one who cannot
Am I the only one who cannot celebrate the death of anyone, not even Bin Laden? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad his reign of terror is over and I'm sure he couldn't have been taken alive and our troops performed admirably, but as a fellow human and a Christian I cannot take joy in violence no matter how necessary it might be. I certainly can't see it as what Jesus would do. I also hope we can learn lessons from this ordeal and find ways to work together with impoverished nations to bring up their standard of living, attain a higher level of education, and avoid conflicts (particularly where we fight the Soviets by proxy through a foreign civil war). Had any or all of this been the case in Afghanistan in the 1980s, we might have prevented 9/11 and the subsequent wars which have taken tens of thousands of lives and affected millions more. I don't mean to say we brought it upon ourselves, as no one deserves what happened on 9/11, just that we ought to learn from history and do what we can going forward to minimize global conflicts and improve the human condition.
Social Media
Comments
News-Gazette.com embraces discussion of both community and world issues. We welcome you to contribute your ideas, opinions and comments, but we ask that you avoid personal attacks, vulgarity and hate speech. We reserve the right to remove any comment at our discretion, and we will block repeat offenders' accounts. To post comments, you must first be a registered user, and your username will appear with any comment you post. Happy posting.