Osama bin Laden and Moral Standards

Source: The Guardian

This is one of those posts. The kind you don't want to write, but you know you must. It's like an itch on your brain, and the only way to get relief is to write.

This one has a long history, from September 2001, to May 2011, to just the past couple of weeks. During the New Year break, while my city was quiet and most of my friends were out of town, I blitzed my way through Season 1 of The Newsroom. It's very powerful, and the writing is incredible. There wasn't a bad episode in the bunch, and a couple of them knocked me off my feet.

Episode 7, simply titled 5/1, was the most impactful of the season. It detailed the events of the evening the killing of Osama bin Laden was announced to the world. In the show there are two primary settings. First is the newsroom, where Will, Charlie and Mackenzie are trying to confirm what they increasingly suspect is the reason for the imminent announcement from President Barack Obama. The second is the inside of an aircraft, where Don, Sloan, Elliot, and all the other passengers are stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia, waiting for a gate.

The writing is powerful and subdued, and Aaron Sorkin covers the necessary symbolic bases subtly and respectfully. There's the aircraft setting. A young woman who lost her father when the towers collapsed is, because of circumstances, in the newsroom, as are two NYPD officers. One of the production crew puts on an NYFD ball cap as the announcement is finally made. It was all poignant and powerful, and I was moved as I watched.

And yet. There was an underlying current that deeply troubled me, and I was transported back to May 2011, when the announcement was actually made, and when I first felt the same unease, along with a whole range of other emotions. 

Here's the thing that troubled me then, and troubles me now. Joy might be too strong a word, but it was the excitement, the happiness displayed over the death of a man.

Relief I can appreciate. Or whatever you call the feeling you get when you believe justice has been served. But back-slapping and celebrations are a whole other thing.

The death of Osama bin Laden did nothing to ease the pain and fill the void left in the lives of those who lost loved ones in 2001. The death of Osama bin Laden may have filled a need for revenge on the part of some, but it did nothing to serve justice. I would even go as far as to say that the death of Osama bin Laden did nothing to prevent further attacks. 

What the killing did do, I will respectfully suggest, is inch the United States just a little further down a road I suspect most Americans would rather not be on.

Back in 2001 one of the statements made at the time, as an attempt to answer the question "Why?", was "They hate our freedoms." It was ridiculous then and it remains so. Yet, it serves as a kind of morose benchmark; scarcely more than a decade later many of those freedoms have been effectively dismantled. 

Within a few days of watching that episode of The Newsroom I came across another item that reinforced this feeling. It was Desmond Tutu's letter to the editor published in the New York Times. He was troubled by the issue of judicial reviews for the targeted killing program of President Obama. Here's the devastating close of his letter:

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

We can debate about the killing of bin Laden, about targeted killings, about drones, until we are all blue in the face. That's not my purpose here. Of course as regular readers will suspect, I see all this now through the lens of the evolution of human consciousness.

Whatever violence may have been in the past, I now see it--whether the violence of an Osama bin Laden or a President Barack Obama--as resistance to change, to growth, to evolution.

Two thousand years after Jesus signaled what the next step was to be by commanding us to love our neighbours, we might just be about ready to do it.

But somebody has to go first.

Everywhere we turn we are being presented with multiple opportunities to do just that. Look around. They're everywhere. In fact it's becoming so obvious, the only way to resist is to lash out in violence of our own.

All that is left to do is to wonder how bad it has to get before somebody, somewhere, turns the other cheek.

Comments

[Christian]

Well said, Mike. Like you said, this is one of those posts that needed to be written.

[Dave]

Great writing, Mike. this type of thinking is one of the reasons l am so proud to call you son. Betty.

[Rick]

Two thousand years after Jesus signaled what the next step was to be by commanding us to love our neighbours, we might just be about ready to do it.

But somebody has to go first.

Mike,

Though I understand your desire to promulgate and propagate the call to love your neightbor (and your enemy)... to suggest that it's not been yet is... well... the height of hubris. Progressive theology like that which you're promoting here is quite blind to the fact that many, many have been loving their neighbors and yes, their enemies for a very long time and some have gone to their deaths doing so.

You lose credibility when you use language so imprecisely, so myopically.

I think it would behoove you to evolve into acknowledging that there are many saints in the Church who have been doing and even are doing what you seem to think you've found ought to be done for very the first time and that this has been occuring over the Church's life.

With all due respect.

[Mike]

Rick, I agree with you completely regarding the work of countless individuals. Here I'm talking about more of a national or even global perspective, approach, and response. (And indirectly I'm also calling out the church's relative silence over this, despite the legacy of so many saints that you're referring to.)

[Rick]

The Church, and by extension sadly her call to love neighbor and enemy as self, is marginalized time and again, at times for good reason, more times out of hatred and ignorance and more importantly and pertinently, too many times by the very call you seem to be embracing. The message you are sending, either by design or accident, is that traditional forms of Christianity are anathema and that things like consciousness awareness and enlightenment (or whatever it is that you've embraced) are the key to spreading the gospel message. I couldn't disagree more.

G.K. Chesterton, who in my mind actually opposed pretty much the same thinking in his time I'm believing you are promoting today, said it best when he wrote "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."

I would add that it's been redefined to mean something other than what it actually is, and attacks on the structures and boundaries of the Church aren't helping in any way.

Might I suggest that the baby (quite literally) is being thrown out with the bath water.

[Mike]

Rick - Note that the main point of the post was to talk about the evolution of humanity... all of humanity. My comment about the church was in parenthesis. That being said, I stand ready to receive your next comment with specific examples of where the church--as an institution, we've covered individuals now--has taken a vocal and active stand against the violence identified in the post. And obviously I mean the western church. Archbishop Tutu has already made his opinion clearly and brilliantly known. Otherwise, with your two comments so far you have the makings of a good post for your own blog.

[Rick]

The Lord attests to a radical rejection of all forms of hatred and violence in favor of the absolute primacy of agape. If, therefore, in history there have been or are forms of violence carried out in the name of God, these are not to be attributed to monotheism, but historical causes, mainly the result of human errors. Rather it is the forgetfulness of God that immerses human societies in a form of relativism, which inevitably generates violence. When you deny the opportunity for people to refer to an objective truth, dialogue is rendered impossible and violence, whether declared or hidden, becomes the rule of law of human relationships. Without openness to the transcendent, which allows us to find answers to questions on the meaning of life and how to live a moral life, mankind becomes unable to act in accordance with justice and work for peace.

-Pope Benedict XVI

Relativism, the diminishing of absolute truth, leads to violence.

Fodder for deeper thinking as you pursue higher levels of consciousness which, in essensce, diminishes the notion of absolute truth.

[Erin Wilson]

Two things came to mind when I read your post; the role of ignorance, and the role of fear.

Ignorance is a perfect breeding ground for violence. I had a very telling conversation with someone at the emergency shelter a couple days ago, about Iraq. In our conversation, I mentioned that I will be moving there. She was incredulous. How could I choose to move to the middle of a war zone, where there are suicide bombings all the time, and women are killed all the time, and on, and on. I told her about my previous (positive) experiences there, and she absolutely couldn't believe it. It was one of those conversations that showed how easy it is to see how a nation could go along with the killing of people they've never met. I don't mean these countries in particular, rather the situation. I can only hope that as the world continues to get smaller, and we learn more about each other from each other... it will get harder to kill each other.

Fear is another key here. Violence is a common fear response, including as a response to fear of God. I wonder, if we are able to move farther into life with God as co-creators... and to leave behind the angry God image, if we can also leave behind the fear and the violence that comes from it.

[Mike]

Rick, I don't believe the idea of expanding levels of consciousness diminishes the idea of absolute truth. In fact, I think it honours it by recognizing that we haven't grasped the reality or entirety of it. Yet.

[Mike]

Erin, such a poignant observation. What a word - ignorance. In the truest sense, it's not about "not knowing", but of "ignoring." Ignorance today, in the developed world at least, is a choice. It's self-induced (with the aid of others.)

And why do we choose to ignore? Because of the politics of fear and anger. Huge. When you step back and look, it sure seems like there is a whole plot line, a script to follow, with violence. I don't believe the attitude of the person you connected with is an accident. It's an absolute requirement of the plot. And if you execute the storyline well (pardon the pun) you end up with otherwise good, caring people dancing and cheering the death of another human being.

[Erin Wilson]

'Ignore'... that's it exactly. That is how so many Jews were killed while the neighbours of the concentrations camps claimed to know nothing was going on. That's how Rwandans chose to believe Belgian lies. It's how the Kurds were slaughtered on mass while the whole world stood by. Genocide needs ignorance/the ability to ignore.

Thinking about it more in the context of consciousness, we enable each other to commit violence. And we enable each other to rise above it. We only move forward together.

[robert]

I remember saying that night that hearing any crowd chant USA!!! USA!! anywhere but at the Olympics always leaves me feeling vaguely depressed. Rejoicing over the death of a person, even a horrible one, was just in bad taste and stupid.
It was a time for quiet contemplation and, if anything, remembering the victims and their families. There was nothing to celebrate. It was a sad end to a terrible period in our history.
And frankly, I didn't disagree with the targeted assassination of OBL. Taking him into custody would have opened a can of worms and unleashed even more violence and he would merely have ended up being executed anyway.
If only the US had used the same logic in Iraq with Saddam, over 100k Iraqi civilians would still be alive. But that's a whole other story.
Not sure if that was the point of your post but it reminded me of that night and how it felt so I thought I'd share.