Darkness cannot drive out darkness.

 What I'm going to write about today has been and is being written about by scores of people.
This piece in the Huffington Post puts it better than I can. Read it for yourselves. Or not.

Psychology of Revenge

But here's my take on things.

So Osama Bin Laden has been found and killed in his little secret compound in Pakistan. I was up last night when twitter and facebook exploded with the news and I thought, "Okay."

I woke up this morning to raucous "Woo-hoo"ings from friends, acquaintances, strangers, television, students, newspapers. As the fakeapstylebook twitter account suggested, "This is one of the few times you'll be able to print swears on your front page without getting letters. Have fun! Slip a 'fuck' in there!" I mean, why not? It's not like anyone died.

Oh wait.

Now, I'm not arguing whether or not Bin Laden deserved to die. I'm not debating whether or not he was a good influence in the world, or if he should have been captured, or if he had redeeming qualities. I'm not doing that because I'm not suggesting tolerance for his actions. But I am advocating temperance in our responses.

I put a quote up from Martin Luther King, Jr. on my own facebook this afternoon. 

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Usually, I try to stay out of politics in public forums, due to my very active awareness of the fact that it usually just causes unpleasant discussions with people who disagree with me. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind it if or when people disagree. I try to have a healthy respect for people's beliefs. I just realize that voicing what may be contentious opinions usually causes... well... contention. And drama. Especially on social networking sites. 

But today, I couldn't help myself, just as I hope I wouldn't be able to help myself from saying something if I saw someone in real life celebrating a death, whether it be the death of a murderer, or the death of a soldier, or the death of a child. Even if the child was super bad and always pulled puppy's tails and sprinkled salt on slugs.


Fortunately, I've seen enough of a mixed response that it doesn't make me feel like we've all reverted to savages who plan on eating our enemies' hearts to give us their strength. I listened on NPR to an interview of two family members that had been directly affected by some of Bin Laden's actions, and they weren't jubilant, they weren't excited, they weren't laughing. The first interviewee lost her husband in the US Embassy  bombing in 1998. The second interviewee had lost two sons, a police officer and a firefighter, in the World Trade Center. They might have been satisfied, but even then, it's a grim sort of satisfaction. No amount of killing can bring back a lost spouse or child, so why act like one person's death makes up for the irrevocable harm of his actions in life? 


In fact, the response that I'm writing against now reminds me of another, similar reaction that I read about when reading this obituary-ish article in the Wall Street journal. "Video later emerged of bin Laden laughing and chatting about 9/11 with associates in which he expressed amazement at the scale of the destruction."

Hm. Looks like hate really does multiply hate.