“So they killed that guy?” My 13 yr. old said to me as we drove to school with National Public Radio playing in the background on the morning after learning of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Before I could answer she said, “Cause, like, he was in another country. Is it OK to just go into another country and kill someone?”
“Ah, well, yeah, I wondered that too, honey. That is a really great question because it doesn’t seem right does it? What I understand is that the US Military went there to capture him and he fired on them and they fired back and killed him.”
“Is it like normal to have world wars that last this long?” my youngest said with thoughtfulness. “Because don’t wars just like usually end in a couple of years? Is this normal?”
“Yes, this has been a long bunch of war-like conflicts. But there is a lot to it.” (I could feel them both slipping away from the conversation now and I found myself drifting, too.)
At 12 and 13 years the Iraq presence and really all of the Middle East presence, is all they have ever known. They were watching the Lion King video the morning of September 11th. The conflicts have been a part of their whole lives, much like the Viet Nam war was for me growing up; always in the backdrop of whatever was on the world stage until I was old enough to have an opinion about it. Of course, there were other domestic conflicts too: civil rights, women’s rights, the murder of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy among many others that lost their lives fighting for voting rights or protesting the war on college campuses. I remember how afraid I was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, asking my father from my six year old view of the conflict, if we were all going to die.
My daughters’ questions point to their way of seeing the world, not with bravado but with some sense of order or justice. I feel the fears in them that our actions bring up—the randomness that it implies. If we can go somewhere and shoot someone, can’t someone else do that to us? Sure this guy isn’t sanctioned by any vote of the people, he isn’t elected, but might another group of people see the actions of a President of the United States as invasive and come here to do the same?
My sister was working in the World Trade Center on September 11 and she made it out that day. Would I be unable to hear the angst and fears of my daughters if my baby sister had been killed? I have mixed feelings today. I believe in our system of justice that calls a person innocent until they have been proven guilty. In a world of terrorism, perhaps that is naïve to hold on to that standard. What is acceptable I wonder then and what just furthers the energy of terror so rampant now in our world? My daughters’ questions remind me how fear begets fear. When is it OK to break the law, even international law and what ultimately will it bring us?
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You know, Cathy, I have many mixed feelings about this too. Yes, I am relieved that he is not out there any longer, but I do not feel jubilant (I might, however, had I lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks or in the military).There is a justice to this certainly - he has alluded justice for his role in many attacks on U.S. interests and the U.S. itself for a long time -- but it is a sad thing that this man and his minions chose such a path of darkness and destruction for his enemies and ultimately for himself. I feel somber, thoughtful, relieved, contemplative today. Thank for sharing your daughters' thoughts and your own.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Lesley. Like you I cannot feel jubilant. I have read many who say that justice has been served by this. And I wonder if it has. To me, justice would have been to bring him to court.I understand why we did not and why it would be so difficult, yet I just wonder what we bring to ourselves when there are rules for some and different rules for others...even the most vile perpetrators.
ReplyDeleteI believe we have to get past the place in which justice is the goal. At that level, "we" continue to provide a position opposite of "them," and so the dynamic continues. This is the level in which humanity gets stuck in who is right, and who is wrong. In a microcosmic example, we have learned that an argument with a spouse or partner is not really "won" or "lost." Until we give up being right, and allow ourselves to be open to healing (i.e., rising up together to a higher place of consciousness in which neither is right or wrong), we will stay in the same dynamic. Someone else will come in to take the place of the person who we thought was wrong, and we will play this whole scenario out again. Therefore, I can't say that I am feeling any sense of resolution today or any sense of a shift in our vulnerability to terrorism. It is OUR problem as a global community to rise above our own judgement and see beyond the human activities we choose, to the awareness that we are indeed all one people, as cells of an organism. We must all act to support the health of the whole being. Incidentally, I believe that one day, cancer will be treated in this way as well--not as a separate entity that needs to be killed or excised, but as a part of the whole that needs to be healed back in to the perfect expression of the body as one.
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