I got a late night text message from a friend who told me the news: FYI the US got Bin Laden. What?? That was my first reaction. The thoughts and emotions that followed kept me from going back to sleep, so I got online and decided to share these complex feelings, write them down, maybe it'll all start to make sense.
Many questions keep repeating in my head. Am I happy that Bin Laden is dead? I despised the man, he was a murderer, and I'm thrilled he can no longer lead, spread hate and death in the name of Islam. I don't know if that is happiness...I truly don't. I think more than happiness I feel sorrow for the lives that have been lost all over the world, I feel an immense sadness for the divide and sometimes mistrust and fear this "war on terror" has created between us and of those who are Muslim or from the Middle East. And I feel remorse for some of our misguided policies in the Middle East, policies that you and I both know are not just based on national security interests.
Do I think anything is going to change? Will we as a nation grow from this, learn, not repeat out past mistakes? Remains to be seen I guess. Were Bin Laden and Al Queda so short sighted as to not account for a plan of action should he be taken out? Will the resentment some in the Middle East feel towards us because of how we have treated them continue to grow and hurt us all? Will the actions of those like Pastor Jones - the crazy man who was so hell bent on burning the Quran - or the policies that we have implemented profiling those with Muslim or Middle Eastern backgrounds and discriminating against them...will the wounds that these and many other actions have created begin to heal?
These questions keep playing in my head. As I try to catch a few hours of sleep before I have to get up and start the week, I also keep revisiting the images of 9/11 and the feeling the devastation we all felt for the last ten year. Yes a murderer is dead, yes we committed murder to kill that murderer, we have started several wars as a result of what happened almost a decade ago and we sacrificed a lot - including our freedoms, our values of equality and anti-discrimination and our civil liberties - to get here. And so, it's up to us to make sure how this goes down in history, it wasn't just the story of an evil man attacking the US and us protecting ourselves and getting him back in the end. That's an over-simplification of what has happened and it's up to us to make sure the complexities are not lost as we write this history.
That's where I'll stop my middle of the night ramblings for now. And my search for answers, to be continued, as always.
