Department of Morons and Vitirol

So I went to the dmv today. Nothing super exciting there, but it did provide me with an hour and a half of mingling with a people group that I otherwise wouldn’t normally associate with – oh the humanity (if you can call it that)… The one constant that I experienced there and pretty much everywhere I have turned today is the incredible amount of hatred people seem to harbor.

Bin Laden is dead. It was bound to happen sooner or later – that in itself doesn’t phase me much, its one more life lost to add to the thousands who have died in these attacks and retaliations. I would have hoped that people were going to react somewhat differently. The cheering, the demonstrations, the mass display of bloodlust has been staggering. I actually sat and listened to a woman today say that she felt “cheated” that he had been killed. Cheated. In her words, he should have been “put in a cage so the public could watch him suffer”. Why? How does anyone derive pleasure at watching someone’s destruction? Don’t get me wrong, I am not writing this in support of his actions. He was an evil man who was responsible for a great deal of suffering. I just cannot understand this mob mentality that seems to have gripped the nation… it disturbs me at my very core.

I want to believe we are better than this. As campy as it sounds, I want to believe we can forgive, that we can heal. That somewhere in this mess the human race can find a common thread and move forward. If we continue to fuel ourselves on hatred and ignorance, we all lose. It’s not sustainable – it is the cancer that eats away at us; and yet here it is, celebrated in our media and embraced by our nation.

To quote Jane Porter, “The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us”