I have lived under the totalitarian fearmongering opportunistic politicians inflicted on this country, while they used Bin Laden as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. I have experienced the rage, the despair, the disgust over how brown-skinned Americans were made to pay for the crimes of someone they didn't even know, and more than likely didn't even agree with. For that alone, I am glad he is gone.
I share a similar sentiment with Jon Stewart who on last night's Daily Show said that while he was alive Osama Bin Laden was the face of Islam instead of the young people trying to make a better world for themselves in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Middle East countries. As someone who had to live under the Bush regime, I know what it's like to finally be free of the world's perception that we are all like that dumb ass piece of jingoistic crap. For this reason alone, his death is important. It gives a new face to people who didn't wear the old one very well.
But I am a pacifist. I can't condone killing. And yet I know the world we live in. I know how desperate the Republicans are to make Obama fail, and so I celebrate that they have to eat at least a bit of their own shit as they are forced to congratulate their nemesis for taking out their symbolic reason for keeping this country under their oppressive thumbs. I'm not so pure that I don't enjoy that part of it immensely.
I suppose for me it all depends on what comes after. Now that Bin Laden is dead, will the fearmongers finally lose their talisman or will they find another one to take its place? As I told someone who expressed optimism that finally the Republicans/Teabaggers will accept Obama as their President now that he showed courage, determination and took the risk in spite of the political peril--not likely as he's still black, no matter how many Bin Ladens he kills. We can't change that about our country. It still has its racist snake pits in Dumbfuckistan and there's not much we can do about that other than live as opposite examples of what they believe.
Maybe that is my hope with this death, that maybe, just maybe we can come together as one people and realize the wedges between us were artificially created by the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys whose definition of terrorism is a united America. Maybe we can realize our own best interest is to be found in coming together as one people and finally put those heartless and greedy political asshats behind us.
But it's hard to be optimistic when I see that the Republican/Teabagger trolls are still out there promoting their stupid sthit. They still earn their pennies by doing their masters' bidding. They still post their ridiculous talking points, mindlessly, stupidly, without thought of how they are the rot destroying the country from within for people who care nothing about them, who care only about power, about money, about using everyone for their own purposes.
In this sense, Bin Laden's death means nothing. It is just another dead body, another excuse to cover the airways with nonsense as filler in betweeen the real purpose of selling us more stuff we don't need but are told we must have. The mainstream news media went from covering a wedding between two figureheads that are meaningless to most Americans, to covering a symbol used to oppress us for the last ten years.
But if there is a good side of this it is that President Obama, who I perceive to be a decent man fighting against a machine fed on wealth and power, will rise a few points in the polls and will probably be elected because of it. When you consider the options on the Republican side, the mean-spirited, corporate-owned slime who want to destroy him so they can take over again, then Bin Laden's death is a very good thing.
And truly, in the end what it means to me is meaningless because to the people who lost loved ones on 9/11, to a country that was forever change by that event, his death is a long overdue symbolic act that gives us all a chance of moving forward.
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