79) The Priceless Victories

With the news of Osama Bin Laden's death, many people are quick to assume that justice has been served and that the war is closer to an end. I'm inclined to follow the victory train, but his death is much more symbolic than most of us are willing to admit.

A good friend from my AP Government class helped me spin up an interesting conspiracy: Obama knew for months and waited on this operation to kill Osama when the political opportunity was right. "Oh, the poll numbers are down? Launch operation 'Best thing we're ever going to do overseas'. Don't forget the DNA samples, or they'll be ripping us down for weeks."

It' hard for me to honestly believe he's dead. Or for that matter, that it might really be his body. Skepticism runs high these days, and let's just hope that the death of a martyr is not the death of hope.

For the families of those who lost their lives to Al-Qaeda, I'm sure that they've been waiting a long time for justice to be served. But I can also understand why many of them weren't jumping for joy in the streets like those at Ground Zero, waving American flags and singing the anthem. I don't know. Maybe they were.

And in that lies justice. Or is it revenge?

Revenge is like a ghost. It takes over every man it touches. Its thirst cannot be quenched until the last man standing has fallen.

-Vladimir Makarov, Modern Warfare 2

And quite the revenge we've gotten. It's only cost us the lives of several thousand U.S. soldiers and a few trillion dollars. Nothing that couldn't have been better used.

Truth is, we always find it easy to associate our hate and anger towards one person. It give us an image to despise, a name to curse.

But we don't ever seem to look beyond a person's actions. We don't understand their motivations. We don't sympathize with the situations that make a rapist kill several young teenagers, or a terrorist from blowing up a school.

We fear understanding these things. We find it so repulsive to look from another person's perspective because it is much, much easier to give into the societal cues of hate and xenophobia.

The blame is easy to place, but the understanding is hard. And if we can't understand our faults and what they were shaped from, how could we possibly be able to fix them? How could we possibly try and prevent evil like this in the future?

I'm not a psychologist, so I'll simply say this:

There are many ways to resolve disputes. Revenge is not one of them.