Morning in America! The evil Osama bin Satan is dead! On the same day as Hitler, May 1st, 2011, which shall be known forever more as the day America got her groove back.
I've been celebrating nonstop since hearing the news. It was the Navy SEALS who put bin Laden down. Customary to Islamic law, he was laid to rest.
On TV last night, I did hear comments about offending Muslims sensitivities about burying the zombie death king at sea. I say that evil s-o-b can rot in hell! Fire his body out of a Trident torpedo tube into magma from an undersea volcano, for all I care. Not to alienate a billion Muslims, but we just kicked some serious ass here. And we are gonna celebrate!
This is what is Americans do: we kick ass. We rout for the home team, and cheer the quarterback on to victory. We don't expect him to screw the cheerleader, we demand it. Winning is what we do best. And we don't win by sitting on our ass, we win by kicking ass! USA, USA!
The Osama death transcends our pretty squabbles and the American family has come together once again. Rich and poor, old and young, we come together right now as one people once again, tied inexorably into one nation, a single identity big enough and strong enough to prove our greatness one more time. Like the old champion, Uncle Sam has come through one more fight, tired, battered, beleaguered, exhausted yet triumphant above his dark foe.
As a people, we don't admit it, but we want to see the villain dangle from the rope and twitch 'til dead. We want to see them...we crave it. We crave the violence and satisfaction that only a violent end to can bring to a people marred with the scars of a mass tragedy nine years ago. And how had our soul ached then. Our American psyche had been ripped apart like a late-April twister raging through Alabama.
We've been restored. We've been able to chop at the root of so much hate growing now for nine, NINE, years (an eternity in American years.)
A whole generation has grown up under the rotten darkness of the Osama tree. Sure, we've chopped at a branch or two over the years--to borrow the Thoreau analogy--but these young Americans have had to endure a grinding tear of this madman who stole their innocence. It's for the young the Osama's death has retrieved their childhoods stabbed by 9-11 as they were. As children, they had to bear the wickedness of the world before their time. It was their nightmares, their fears that the dark man Osama brought out of the closet and out from under the bed. Our generation had only been forced to think about the unthinkable--nuclear war; they'd got to see it unfold realtime on their TVs.
We've pulled the weed at its root: Osama, the seed of all this evil, this waging of war upon us, the murderer of some many, the epitome of SO MUCH HATE is dead! All the evil that bin Laden has brought us can now be laid to rest, permanently destroyed. With Osama's death comes peace in victory. The world can know relax knowing that we--the United States--will destroy the enemies of mankind and bury them permanently in the sands of time.
The price we--the United States--have paid has been high but there's light now at the end of the tunnel. Left to fester unanswered, insatiable, the thirst for revenge ground us down. Our War on Terror has borne the wicked fruit of two, long, seemingly endless, ugly wars. As they grind on ceaselessly, it bestows on young American men and women the carnage both physical and mental.
Osama's death impacts us on a emotional level. If you perhaps are not getting into it, you're missing the point, which is that there is no point. There is nothing to get. That is the point. We have endured, sacrificed, and claimed for us what is rightfully ours: a future free of evildoers, to borrow the Bush term, who would do us harm. So excuse me if I don't provide a panoply of reasons why you should take glee in the death but if you can't feel it, I guess you won't know it, like cheering for the home team.
With our modern technology we could trace our emotional reactions through brains scans. Neurologists can identify emotional triggers by the level of neural activity within one portion of the brain. Scans of people's brains reveal which sections of the brain are the most affected by particular triggers or events.
Digital scans can dissect layers of brain tissue one by one, and record different colors based on the specific activity levels within the brain. Watching a public hanging, for instance, stimulates different parts of the brain than would attending an art show, perhaps.
Our reaction to Osama getting a bullet in his head is a level far more primitive and carnal, remorseless and spiteful than we'd admit. It'd hardly register in the frontal lobe, where intellect resides. But it's on a more primitive level that we come together as people of a common country. We react emotionally because we're human. We need to be honest with ourselves, and accept that our lower nature is part of who we are. Perhaps the fiery gratification can act as a salve to bind us just as the collective desire to avenge 9-11 and its victims spurned a fit of nationalism after 9-11-01.
Excuse the adults if they do end up drunk with joy over Osama's death. Just as important as getting revenge is burying the desire to get revenge. It feels as if a thousand pounds were lifted off our nation's soul.
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