You know what's surreal? Sitting at a baseball game watching a man maybe five years older than myself awkwardly fist bump an old woman because our country killed a criminal mastermind on the far side of the world.
I had originally typed "murdered" in that sentence, but that's not right. And it's important to be right about this. This was an official operation and he was an official enemy of the country. He's killed. Not murdered. That difference matters.
But I'd have preferred executed.
I don't, as a rule, believe in killing anyone. And I get very uncomfortable with any group (and especially a country) singling out an individual as needing to die for any reason. But speaking as that guy, with those beliefs, I have little to no problem with us not sharing a planet with a homicidal madman from now on. I have problems with how it's done, but I can't argue the final result needed to happen.
It's just that I'd have liked a trial and a body, in that order.
I can see how he'd have become a symbol while on trial. I can see how it's just more practical to put a bullet in someone who's been keeping one cave ahead of our entire armed forces for roughly ten years. I can see how if you're an American soldier with that man in your sights, you don't go for the knee.
But I don't know what it says about us as a country that our response to a big enough crime is to just track you down, shoot you, and bury the body at sea.
And I don't like not having a body for proof, even if I can understand not even wanting to leave something to venerate after the job is done. And I don't like the sneaking, cynical suspicion that even more than the birth certificate, this is the President proving he's a real American by killing America's archenemy.
I don't know. There's justice here, but it's justice for America alone. For everything that came after, I feel like his crime was of a scale that we needed to put him on trial in front of the world. The world needed to say "you don't get to kill that many people and remain a part of the global community". And then the noose, cremation, spread the ashes into international waters with little ceremony and no celebration.
I was there when they were chanting "USA, USA" at Citizens Bank Park. And while I like the USA just fine, celebrating a killing isn't something I can get behind. You don't high-five your bros for putting down a mad dog.
He was always going to die for what he did, and even I'll say it was rightly so and too-long delayed. I'd have just preferred it to be an execution, not a killing.
Thank you, truly, for this post. The bloodlust and congratulations on Twitter yesterday made me sick and sad. I was starting to feel like I was the only one in the world with this opinion, but of course I'm not.
ReplyDeleteAssassination is never just. If anyone should have gotten a trial, it was him. The response to inhumanity should be more humanity, more compassion.
I appreciate that, but...I went to pains to not call it assassination or murder, because it's not. It really isn't. It was a military action to eliminate a target during wartime, with an immediate public acknowledgment of its success. It's not a choice I like, but it's as cleanly done as it could've been.
ReplyDeleteAnd my way's not all that compassionate either, because he still ends up dead. But he ends up dead in a public forum, with the reasons why society is putting him to death out in the open and with as little ambiguity as possible.
But I still don't like the bloodlust. I get where it's coming from, but I don't like it at all.
I guess we part ways there, because I don't consider the 'War on Terror' to be war-time. The ability to designate anybody on the planet an 'enemy combatant' is one of the vilest, most insidious powers which the US presidents have granted themselves since this whole thing began. Even the worst Nazi butchers got a show trial at Nuremberg, with all their crimes read out for the world to hear, and that was most definitely war-time.
ReplyDeleteI also don't think the state, any state, should kill. Full stop.
But the bloodlust thing... yeah. I can't imagine what it must have been like at that stadium. Yesterday made me realize that I never want to be a part of the mob again -- any mob, for any reason.