Like many others I have been listening, watching and reading all the coverage there has been of the recent death of Bin Laden. I have been overcome with a wave of different emotions as I contemplate all that has occurred and what it means. In the end I am left with sorrow. I remember 9/11 and what that day was like. What I remember most about 9/11 was one of the professors at Beloit College, sitting on the steps, crying, weeping that this would undo all the work that had been for peace, for tolerance, for justice. Now, almost 10 years later can we really say that things are over? Did the death of Bin Laden really change things, or is it just the next domino in the tragic chain that has been rippling through our lives since those towers came down, since those airplanes were transformed from methods of transportation into methods of destruction and death?
On April 30th, Hitler committed suicide rather than risk capture by the oncoming forces, on May 1st, Bin Laden is killed by US forces and if we enter the realm of fantasy, on May 2nd, Lord Voldemort dies in the Battle of Hogwarts. Three people who would often be attributed with evil. Three people who ordered the deaths of hundreds and even thousands. And yet today as I prepare for Mother's Day on Sunday I came upon these words, written to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. "We shall not commit injustice in the name of justice done ... we shall not seek honor in the death of any mother's son ... Christ's peace shall reign on earth"
All three of these individuals, terrible though their actions may be are someone's son. If we forget that, we become like them, able to see death as nothing more than a means to achieve our ends. If we are to recover from 9/11 we must find a way to reverse this, to undo this cycle of violence that only spirals onwards. Now we live in fear of reprisals for our actions, counterattacks by followers of Bin Laden seeking to avenge his death which will only cause us to need to avenge more deaths. Is death totally avoidable? Can we truly live nonviolently? I would like to believe so, but whether or not it is possible, I know this, even in the death of someone like Bid Laden, there is cause for sorrow, here is someone's son ... here is a child of God ... what can we do to make sure that other sons and daughters do to not end up the same.
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2 comments:
I've been thinking about this a lot, too. To me, what seems more frightening than violent acts in the first place is the idea of committing these acts without taking responsibility for them, saying that they are "justified" or "justice done" and that therefore it's all a no-brainer and out of our hands. It could be that killing Bin Laden is something we have decided we need to do in order to feel safer. But it's still a decision, and maybe what lingers in the air after this act (and what creates motive for future violence) is not even precisely the killing itself but the unsubstantiated meaning we attach to it. Killing in someone's name, killing in the name of justice, seems to me precisely attached to what we as human beings call "evil." The irony is that by identifying "evil" in others and deciding the only natural thing is to fight it, we commence to participate in it ourselves, even if not directly or right away. I don't believe in this as an exact formula but it seems to hold a frightening amount of truth at the moment.
Elisabeth
If I had a stroke for 1 year where would that place me?
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