Dancing Over Death

Osama bin Laden expected to die during the first weeks of the American invasion of Afghanistan. He was not a man who feared death – he invited it with his actions, over and over again – and we should remember this as we celebrate a victory for our side in this struggle. I phrase it that way intentionally, “celebrate a victory for our side in this struggle,” because if it’s purely death that we’re celebrating – that’s disgusting. This is not a conflict between individuals – it’s a conflict between nation states based on the idea of individual rights and stateless networks seeking to replace their constitutions with scriptures at gunpoint. Score one for the nation states. The American raid that killed bin Laden is evidence of the enduring ability of governments and state-sanctioned violence to control the battlefield. Among seven billion people, they can still find the one they want, and they can kill him. If that’s the side you’re on, that’s something to celebrate, especially after ten long years cast doubt on the whole idea.

There are a lot of other stateless networks trying to undermine governments, but everyone knows al-Qaeda’s name – that’s mostly because of an innovation that came during a meeting at their headquarters in the 1990s. At that time it was still in Sudan, before they bombed the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, causing the Sudanese government to evict them under pressure from Bill Clinton. At that meeting, bin Laden sided with a cleric who argued that indiscriminate killing of civilians is legitimate. The reasoning was two-fold – if the victims are Muslim, the attackers are only speeding their passage to heaven. If the victims aren’t Muslim, well, they’ve should’ve been and then they would’ve been ok. Even in the extremist circles from which al-Qaeda came, this was an unpalatable and controversial idea. Many members left the group in protest at what they saw as the unacceptably brutal policy shift, which opened the door for mass murder and terrorism on a scale rarely, if ever, seen before.

I disagree with his conclusions so vehemently that my normally-almost-pacifist tendencies bend to allow breathing space for other ideas; ideas that look like vindictive hopes – hope that the scaffolds of religious certainty supporting bin Laden’s life came crumbling down as the doors to his safe house were kicked in, hope that in the bursts of fire images of crumbling towers and empty chairs at the dinner table came crashing into his merciless reality, hope that he had time to see only blood stains where he thought heaven would be, hope that the bullets spun into him in slow motion – the sting of a million tears in their orbits, each one bearing the hurt his arrogant life inflicted on a thousand souls – but most of all, hope that when the shooting is over his ideas look as bullet-riddled as his body.

Because this is about ideas, not individuals. Dancing in the streets of DC and writing Facebook statuses celebrating a man’s death is not going to help. How about bowing your head as you recognize that violence (even when it seems necessary and justified and feels good) brings more violence – anticipatory moments of silence for those who will be killed in revenge attacks inspired by bin Laden’s killing. We believe that he deserved every bullet, but there are people who believe we deserved every bitter tear that fell back in 2001, and they won’t be happy about the death of their hero. We believe they’re wrong, but our task is not to dance and Facebook about it. It’s to show the world that they’re wrong, that our way of respecting the dignity of life through the guarantee of individual liberties is more just than their way of respecting life only through forced submission to their version of god.

We believe in the value of human life, in this lifetime. We believe every man, woman, other and child is worth protecting with the rule of law. We believe every person has a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They don’t (believe that).

When they kill us, they dance in the street. When we kill them … what do we do? The same thing? We are better than that. Our ideas are better than that.

How about this instead:

When they kill us, they dance in the street. And we can say, “This is wrong. We will kill the ones who did this, because they deserve it and we deserve to know that they will never be able to do this again. They can wake up every morning knowing that maybe today is the day we will find them and kill them, and all they have to look forward to is being right. And when that day comes, we can rejoice in a shared goal accomplished. But we will take no pleasure in killing, because we believe in life – and when the humanity we show makes the world think twice about dancing over death, then our ideas will have accomplished something that will always be beyond the reach of our guns.”

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Those are some of my thoughts, but not all of them. Most of the rest can be summed up in the word “thankful.” Thankful that:

– President Obama celebrated life and healing, not death and destruction, in an address worthy of his office.

– America counts among its citizens professional, capable and committed soldiers like the ones who carried out this raid. Even though their target never showed any concern for our families, they showed concern for his by flying deep into a foreign country and jumping into a firefight instead of leveling a house with bombs.

– the American government and military treated bin Laden like a human being, giving him more than he gave thousands of Americans, English, Spanish, Tanzanians, Kenyans, Iraqis, Afghans and others – a chance to be buried in a way respectful of the religion he thought he followed. (He was buried at sea after a brief funeral service offered by an American chaplain on an aircraft carrier.)

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But there are some more unexpressed thoughts that thankfulness can’t convey. The word for them is “challenged.” Challenged, that:

– in the eyes of friends and loved ones, I might catch glimpses of a world in which killing is always a choice and that choice is always turned down. If that world exists out there somewhere, it came from this one.

– scriptures suggesting absolute non-violence might actually mean what they say. We know what to do when someone takes our coat. What do we do when someone kills our loved ones? Though modern murder might be more shocking than anything that’s come before, we are not the only ones to deal with these questions, and our answers are not the only ones.

– this might be a unique learning experience for humanity in general. Have the moral dilemmas posed to the world in the last few days ever existed as publicly or as acutely as this?