Celebration!

A once in a lifetime event occurred last Sunday evening. Perhaps one of the most evil people we have known was killed by US Special forces in Pakistan. Osama Bin Laden had been hiding there for the last 5 years and through the extraordinary efforts of US Intelligence, Navy Seals and the President of the United States, was found and summarily executed.

In the US, when the news broke there was a significant reaction by many people in the United States and around the world. They celebrated. They gathered together on college campuses, by the White House, at Ground Zero in NYC, in streets all around the world and celebrated. There was singing and dancing and shouts and chants of joy. But some people have been very critical of the celebration, saying that we are insensitive to celebrate the death of another person no matter how heinous the crime. They said things like if the parents of someone who was murdered had a party on the day the murderer was killed as punishment with a lethal injection, we too would feel that this was wrong and out of place.

There is one significant difference in this scenario however. In the case of the parents, the scope of the murder and who it touches is small. Family members, relatives and friends. The collapse of the World Trade Center affected all of us by its nature, a terrorist attack on our country. Even if you had no connection to any of the victims, you were impacted in some way. Life in our whole country changed that day, and not for the better.

The celebrations that night were not generally vindictive. They were a celebration of our unity, our citizenship, our freedoms. It was an emotional out pouring of relief. I know that we will still have to fear terrorists, fear what they might do. But we had the opportunity to celebrate that this individual, Osama Bin Laden would not be affecting us ever again.

I talked with someone who was at Ground Zero last Sunday. Jill, a good friend, told us that the celebration there helped fill the hole that was all that was now left at Ground Zero, that people came together spontaneously and that in some way healing was taking place.

That is good enough for me. Go ahead and celebrate. Remember if only for a few minutes, that feeling of nationalism, of patriotism, of freedom from oppression. Just remember, the moment is fleeting and there is always more work to be done.