The Osama Drama

Hello, movers and shakers! (I hope you don’t mind that I call you that…) Consider this the second official post for this brand spankin’ new blog.

Call it a cop out, but Sunday night’s news about the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL) is big enough to breach a blog about big ideas, no? In that spirit, let’s talk Osama, shall we?

Housekeeping: I think that a very important part of this blog-project is to incorporate follower/commenter input as much as possible. So, I will start taking snippets of comments from the last few posts and make it a starting point for the next post. I feel like this will give some continuity to the posts as well as add to the diversity of the post themes.

Disclaimer: We are still getting information about this story, so we will clearly be running of what we have been hearing in the media. That said, I am more interested in the reaction that Westerners (particularly here in America) have had to OBL’s demise.

The Consensus

With all of that in mind, Anthony Norton said something particularly interesting in response to the first ever post.

It seems to me that members of humanity (broadly construed) have consistently carried out both compassionate and oppressive actions throughout history till this very day (as should be obvious in this particularly turbulent political era in which we are living.)

Agreed. While this seems almost obvious that we can call OBL’s actions extremely oppressive and horrible, it seems like his actions could only have occurred in the current globalized polity. We might be able to go as far and say that if we placed the sum of his actions on a scale, the bad would clearly outweigh the good. This is just a really longwinded way of saying he is a globalized bad guy that drew the ire of most of the world.

The Debate: We’re Supposed to Hate Bad Guys, Right?

Almost immediately after we heard news of Osama’s death, people immediately hit the streets (especially in Washington, DC and NYC). Even here in Austin, TX people were setting off fireworks and celebrating the news.

A preliminary question, are we celebrating death?

Jon Stewart says yes, but we shouldn’t be too worried about the moral implications of this celebration because OBL was a horrible man. (here's the full episode from last night)

David Sirota at Salon.com has a very different reaction. He claims that in celebrating OBL’s death, we’ve lowered ourselves to his level, recalling images of people in the Arab world celebrating the fall of the twin towers. A more appropriate reaction should be a bitter sigh of relief. (here's his piece)

But again, are we even celebrating death? I had a chance to talk to my close friend/former roommate Khaled last night about this. He doesn’t think that it is a celebration of death. Instead, he thinks of this as an end to an era.

I think in my own reaction, I agree with Khaled. The timing could not be more profound. In the midst of the Arab Spring (which may be turning into an Arab year? *looks at Syria and Yemen) the death of OBL accompanies the death of al-Qa’ida’s promise: that their brand of extremism is the panacea for an Arab/Muslim world plagued by autocratic rulers. OBL's death only punctuates then end of al-Qa'ida's relevance.

That said, I don’t think that the public’s reaction has been my own. I think that there has been a level of triumphalism that exceeds an appreciation of ideological shifts in the Middle East. It is a celebration of death, and I don’t think I am terribly comfortably with that. The U.S. military had the decency to treat his body to a proper Islamic burial within 24 hours. I’ll end with something I said on Facebook that really sums up how I feel about the news.

“Real quick, before we sober up from the drunken celebrations of OBL's death, can we go through the necessary hangover of a realization over the thousands of dead U.S. servicemen/women died for this ill conceived "war on terror", the tens of thousands of Afghani and Pakistani civilians dead, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, not to mention the civil liberties lost, and the trillions of dollars wasted?”

Questions for Discussion

What is your reaction to the news?

Is the public reaction to OBL’s death rightly termed a celebration of death?

If it is, is that appropriate?

If it is not, is it ever appropriate to celebrate death? And what is the focal point of the public celebrations if not OBL's death?

A Heart Big Enough for Mine

So here’s a post to kick things off about human nature. It’s a long one, and it’s more of a personal anecdote than an argument, but it’s an experience that has left an indelible mark on my beliefs. And as a disclaimer, there will be relatively few posts like this, but this has been on my mind for some time.

In the winter of 2009/2010, I was lucky enough to visit Rwanda on a human rights delegation that lasted about 3 weeks. The story of that trip alone is enough to write a memoir, so I will relay what I consider one of the most important parts.

An important part of our delegation was visiting sites in Rwanda that were particularly significant to the 1994 genocide. Each visit was deeply emotional and impactful, but none so much as the church at Nyamata. Tutsis attempting to escape the massacre hid in the church seeking refuge, the Interahamwe militias had no mercy and killed 24,000 people in 2 days between April 10th and 12th, 1994.

Here is a picture of the inside of the church (that someone else took).

Today, the church is left largely in tact, with bullet holes, bloodstains, and the clothes of the dead acting as reminders of the atrocities. When our delegation visited, there were only two people there: an elderly Rwandan woman and our tour guide - a young man who had survived the massacre (he was only a boy at the time). He shared his story of being squeezed in that church with the other Tutsis hearing the primal screams of the genocidaires outside. He then described exactly what he saw when they entered – murders, rapes, mutilations – in lurid detail. It was horrifying. The tour guide would point to various corners of the church and tell us what happened in that specific spot, who was killed and how. All the while, a bullet-ridden statue of Mary looked over the church as though she were a silent witness to evil.

He led us to the back of the church grounds and showed us where hundreds of these people had been buried. This tomb was a very narrow stairway that led down to a long narrow hallway where coffins were stacked at least seven high. As some of our delegation moved through, myself included, I began to experience seriously intense emotional reactions to the place. As I tried to make my way past the others in this narrow hallway, one of them accidentally bumped into me so my chest was pressed against one of the coffins. It was too much.

I left the tomb as quickly as possible and as soon as I was outside I wept openly. It was impossible to imagine the suffering that went on at that place and to experience even a small fraction of it was overwhelming.

As I walked away from the tomb crying, that same elderly Rwandan woman saw me and immediately rushed over. She held me tightly, as if she knew that I had just been pressed against a coffin. She blew gently on my neck, patted my back and whispered calming words. While I couldn’t understand what she was saying, I knew exactly what she was doing. She was acting as my mother would in that moment, offering me comfort. It suffices to say that I completely lost it and was simply bawling in this stranger’s arms. But these tears were cathartic more than anything. They were a release.

It was only when the delegation had left the church altogether that we were told that the elderly woman was a survivor herself, that she lost almost her entire family in that church, that she had suffered a stabbing attack from the same people that had killed her family. We learned that she had been through unimaginable trauma.

It is then that I understood the magnitude of what she did for me. She saw someone, clearly a foreigner, crying over her trauma, and decided to comfort him. She had been through a literal hell and still had the compassion to treat me as one of her own.

If there is a single experience that has informed my opinion on human nature it would be this one. In that place, I saw the scars human evil. I saw and heard things that I wish I could forget. In the same place, I saw someone who survived all of that and still had a heart big enough to care for mine.

I believe that humans, for whatever reason, are fundamentally good in nature. Humans rarely seek to harm one another, and even in the most appalling and horrendous circumstances, have the capacity to demonstrate a deep compassion.

Why? Why the hell not?

Hello world!

So I am sitting in my internship, and while I should be doing a million other things right now, I had an idea. This is partially inspired by a professor I had last semester of the name Joel Swerdlow (I just discovered that his wiki page is HUGE). He tried a forum for exchanging ideas about any and everything important. I can imagine his deepish voice now "I feel a provacative rhetorical question coming on..."

How about we talk big?

I would love for this blog to become a place where big ideas that move and shake the world can be presented, torn apart, discussed, and dissected.

A couple of things...

1) This blog will probably trend toward the political. That's what I do, and that's what a lot of cool people I know do as well.

2) This blog can be about ANYTHING you consider to be really, really important. Something relating to human nature (or the lack thereof), or social trends, or cultural oddities that may or may not impact anyone significantly. Seriously... anything...

3) In writing, you can register your discourse as formally as you would like, or you can be as fuckin' lude as you want. No rules. What is important is the substance of the post and the idea you are trying to express.

4) If all of this sounds really vague and ambiguous, good. I realize that I might be sacrificing specificity for inclusion, but if I had to choose, that's definitely the choice I would make.

That's all for now. I'm going to get started on a first post about whether or not people are good or bad by nature...