The Making of Heroes

Ding dong! Osama's dead.  Ding dong the terr- or- ist is dead Dead DEAD!

That is the morning hue and cry.  I am surprisingly ambivalent.  He needed killin'.  We (the US) needed to do it.  It would have been more effective and more jubilant if it had happened in October 2001.  That date would have made George W into a hero. But Osama Bin Laden seemed to just disappear into a puff of smoke any time we had any intelligence on where he might be hiding.  The media kept us well informed on all that 'intelligence' so Bush supporters had a lot of evidence to laud how hard their hero was trying to bring about justice.  Obama will never be allowed to claim 'hero' status because his administration caught up with a man that evaded discovery for nearly ten years.  The Obama-haters will still hate.  They will question why he waited so long if the intelligence pinpointed Bin Laden in August 2010.  The May 21 Rapturites will claim this was prophesied and that Osama must be the anti-Christ.  Or perhaps Obama is the anti-Christ and this is just part of Satan's plan to make him a hero. The Bush-haters will comment on Obama accomplishing in two years what Bush couldn't do in seven.   But the truth of the matter is;  eventually he was going to get caught.  Eventually, the CIA, the military, the FBI, MI5, Interpol...  SOMEBODY was going to find him.  Our world is no longer a place one can hide forever.  The most amazing fact is that the operation remained secret for so many months.  Our hungry shark media never breathed a word about the intelligence or the operation.  The Obama-haters will claim it's the liberal media trying to create a hero.  The Bush-haters will claim he deliberately leaked every bit of intelligence to make himself look better.  We won't know the truth.  Hopefully, both our leaders and the media have re-learned that old World War II adage. "Loose lips sink ships"  And that was WAY before twitter.

I find myself amused with the media frenzy...  Bin Laden was hiding out in a mansion.  Mansion?  Really?  It sort of reminded me of the "compound" at Waco.  An attempt by the ATF to serve a warrant there in February 1993, ended up in a fiery confrontation ending fifty days later on April 19.  Seventy-six people, including more than twenty children and two pregnant woman, died.  I don't remember any jubilation.  Just an overpowering sense of horror at what other people can believe, and what our government is capable of doing.
We have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in the "war on terror" and yet some seem naive enough to believe that this is the end of the war.  And that killing Osama somehow washed the blood from our own hands.  

The history behind the invasion at Waco was not an immediate "fools rush in" event, even if that is what it appeared to be.  The cult itself was launched in 1959 when Florence Houteff announced that the coming of Christ was imminent.  They had many legal troubles over the years including a fight for leadership that included digging up poor Florence (whose prediction we are still awaiting) and having a "resurrection contest."  Is that some kind of cult pissing match?  It culminated in the opponent accusing the resurrector of "corpse abuse".  Anyway, the person that won on that point was the man that eventually changed his name to David Koresh.  aka Jesus.  He practiced polygamy and made having sex with underage girls a sacred event (Texas....).  He claimed God ordered him to procreate with the women of his cult in order to create his following of  "special" people.  His wives, lovers, and other "special" people died.  But that was a situation that was thirty-odd years in the making.

The passage of time has very little to do with evil.  Or the extermination of evil.  And generally there's not any one certain evil person or one certain hero.  Evil, as well as good, is a group effort.  And sometimes the line gets blurred between the two.

The moral of this story is:
1.  Bin Laden may be dead, but there's some other evil bastard just waiting to take his place.
2.  You don't have to be Muslim, or foreign, to be a complete nutjob.
3.  Justice moves at its own pace.
4.  Jesus may be coming, but I'm not claiming to be "special" enough to know when!