Friday, June 16, 2006

CELEBRATING DEATH

I had a discussion with my husband the other day that left a really bad taste in my mouth. I’m not sure what bothered me more—the actual issue or the feeling that I am totally out of sync with most of my fellow Americans. I always thought of myself as optimistic and patriotic but now I’m beginning to wonder… Am I really the bleeding heart liberal that he claims I am? Am I unpatriotic, clueless, and out of touch with reality? Sometimes I think maybe I am…

It all started because my husband had the news on while we were getting ready for work. He knows better than to turn the news on in the mornings, because I invariably get anxious, annoyed or terribly sad. If he’s lucky, I’ll just be a little melancholy. If he’s unlucky, I’ll go off on some kind of philosophical rant that he knows we’ll have opposite opinions about. This was one of the latter days…

The newscaster was talking about the president’s speech. It seemed to me that the speech in question, the newscaster, and the president were all happily bragging about the death of a top terrorist. I said to my husband, “Don’t you think it’s in poor taste for the leader of a country to celebrate the fact that he was responsible for another human being’s death?”

My husband emphatically disagreed. “The man was an enemy of the United States, he deserved to die, and it was the president’s JOB to make that happen,” he responded.

First of all, I question whether we, as human beings, should feel entitled to decide whether any other human being should live or die. However, I do live in the real world (most of the time), and I know that no matter what I think, wars happen and people die. I don’t understand why we had to bomb the crap out of a whole town, endangering countless others, to kill one man, but we’ve already established the fact that I’m clueless.

So for the sake of this argument, let’s say that this was a man that had to be killed in order to save many other lives. That man was still a human being. If he had nothing else, I’ve got to believe that he at least had a mother or someone else out there that cared about him. Maybe he did evil, unconscionable things in his life. But he was still a living creature, and to celebrate the death of any living being seems wrong to me.

What kind of a message are we sending to our children about the sanctity of human life? That it’s okay to kill certain humans, in fact, it’s encouraged? When it’s okay to celebrate the death of a “monster,” how long will it be before that definition of “monster” broadens and changes to include our own loved ones? I know I may be in the minority for saying this, but I just think it’s scary and in poor taste to brag about killing anyone or anything, even if it was a “justifiable” death.

The irony of this situation is not lost on me. I realize that countless Americans have died so that I could sit here safe and secure on my couch, free from fear and able to exercise my right to freedom of speech, my right to speculate on the “morality” of celebrating the death of the “enemy”—the same enemy that has killed so many of the people that fought for my right to write this.

But I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it, no matter how hard I try. To me, any untimely death is a sad, solemn occasion, regardless, and sometimes because of, how that life was spent.

- A.