Terminal Lance “Geronimo-E KIA”

You’ll have to excuse the crudeness of today’s strip. I haven’t really had time to put together a real one, but aside from that, my Intuos pen found its way into the washing machine today and is no longer in service. I’ll have to do the strips by hand until I’m able to acquire a new one. I used to do all of the strips by hand, actually, until I left Hawaii back in May of last year. I had planned on switching back to doing them by hand, but the ease of the digital age ended up getting the best of me.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (har har) for the last couple of days, I’m sure you know by now that Osama bin Laden is dead. I’m sure you’ve seen the flurry of idiotic Facebook statuses ranging anywhere from “FUCK THOSE SAND COONS” to “omg we shouldn’t be celebrating someone’s death because I have virtually no understanding of the last ten years and haven’t cared about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan at all–which is completely true, but I’m going to pretend like I give a shit right now.”

Whatever your own social networking update, there’s no hiding from it. For me personally, I feel that the President did a fine job of summing it up by saying:

“His demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

Hey, if it’s good enough for a Nobel Peace Prize winner, it’s good enough for me.

Is the idea of celebrating someone’s death a little bit morbid? Yes, but this isn’t someone. This is America’s most prolific enemy in a very long time. This is the man responsible for September 11th, 2001–and all of the devastation that followed for the next ten years. He was an enemy to the American people in the most lucid sense of the word, and his death is a great victory for our nation on all accounts. Will it change anything in the short run? No, of course not. The war is not over, the enemy still exists and will continue to fight; and probably more importantly, we will continue to fight them.

I typically pride myself on my civility, as it’s something I believe all humans should embrace (even us Neanderthal sub-humans). I truly believe that the human race can only move forward through absolute pacifism on a global scale. Our species as a whole would do a great deed to themselves by throwing their weapons down and moving forward in the many fields of sciences, such as astrophysics, biology and medicine. I would love to fire every Marine and put that money into the space program where the vast expanses of space and everything in between would be ours for the exploring. New planets, civilizations, theories, worlds and technologie await us in this utopian future.

Unfortunately, this future is a long way off, and I am a member of our imperfect, barbaric society along with the rest of you. It is thus, that I decree, we embrace the brutality of this situation that has arisen. Thousands gathered in the streets last night chanting into the darkness the glory of the United States, all over the death–or more correctly, the assassination–of one man.

No, we are still in the same brutal, callous world that we’ve always been in. A world where things are not perfect, and people do not throw their arms down in support of a greater cause. We live in a world where heinous actions do not go unnoticed, and this weekend justice was dealt where justice was needed–in the form of a bullet to the chest and another to the head.

Most importantly though, we live in a world that embraced it–and rightfully so.