Streets filling with crowds cheering U. S. A....excitement and celebration over a planned hit, over murder. It has been ten years that we have been hunting Osama Bin Laden and yesterday they killed him and took his body. Yet people here are glad and I find it haunting and sad. Does killing him really feel like victory? He has been training men to be terrorists and by killing him none of that changes. And do we really want to be a country that celebrates us murdering people?
We seem to be a Reactive country...you come here and hurt us we will hunt you down and hurt you. Isn't that what our involvement with WWII was about? That has been our stance since 9-11...find and kill. How will this be weighted against us as a nation. The President said last night "God bless America" and I had to think... Why? Why bless a nation who chooses vengeance and murder? Why bless a country that uses hurt as justification to kill? Why bless a nation that is so busy caring about ourselves we do nothing to stop terrorist except through violence? Would the same people cheering last night ever be willing to serve a year giving a good education to the poor and illiterate communities where the Taliban recruits from? Would they be willing to give money to help empower the people there to not have to choose to eat or to fight? Would they do everything they could be provide a good education instead of the slanted one the terrorists give?
Why can't we be proactive? If we really wanted to get back at the Taliban for coming and causing terror here why not rush into those countries and love them? Why not cut down on the places they can intimadate? Why not run into their towns and show compassion and grace? Love and mercy doesn't cost lives...it can transform souls. Because it is less about what we feel like we deserve and more about how we can keep other young lives from having to choose being a terrorist to survive. The government can't do it...but small grass root organizations can and are working towards these things.
Yet in we ran with guns...killing. How does that make us any better then them? How does that make up for the loss of the precious lives we lost ten years ago? It doesn't...it makes it all feel hollow. Revenge never feels as good as we think it will. Why do we deserve to be vindicated and not the people who have to daily live under the Taliban's rule? We believe in freedom...but just for us.
2 comments:
Thanks for this post - verbalizing all the conflicting emotions I've been wrestling with all day.
Good thoughts. As I was talking to one of the managers yesterday (who is a non-Christian), he said it really bothered him with people celebrating like this. I told him it is kind of like the quote from The Patriot, when Mel Gibson says something like, why do people feel they can justify death with more death? So true. I was thinking on the way home yesterday, I deserved death just as much as OBL. But humanity doesn't want to look at it that way. I am so thankful that I am redeemed, and I am very sad that Christians are celebrating a soul going to Hell. Jesus died for OBL too. Anyway, still wrestling with so many thoughts...
Michelle
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