Bin Laden is Dead

In seventh grade I had a basic computing class. Our assignment one day was to find a person on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted List and to print them out. I chose a man whose appearance was unlike the others; older with a beard. He'd helped plan an embassy bombing it said. I looked at his photo and part of me whispered that he would go on to do more dangerous things that that. The USS Cole bombing and more embassy bombings proved me right.

Then there was a Tuesday morning in September of 2001. It was a day like any other. I was in Keyboarding, the third row, second seat from the aisle when a runner came from the PoliSci teacher telling us to turn on the news, that history was unfolding. Just as it has tonight.

We saw a second plane hit the World Trade Center. And then the announcements came on about ten minutes later, and as the bell rang to switch classes, we were hearing something about the Pentagon being on fire. My principal banned television. I did not know the twin towers were gone, that a part of the Pentagon was destroyed, or a fourth plane had gone down in rural Pennsylvania...not until my ride came to get me.

A war quickly developed, targeted after one man and one man alone. The same man whose face I had looked at three years prior, Osama bin Laden. Over half my life has passed since I first looked upon an imagine of that face...and now, he is dead.

I do not rejoice at his passing as many I know do. I believe that all life is sacred from conception to natural death, even his as bitter a pill as it is for me to swallow. Christ called us to love our enemies, and the book of Proverbs tells us not to rejoice in the fall of an enemy. That said, I do not celebrate his passing, but I definitely do not mourn it.

May God have mercy upon this man's soul, for few others would. There are thousands of dead bodies that can attest to that, for he has destroyed worlds entire. I would like to paraphrase Surah 5, verse 32 very roughly as I seem unable to find the exact page in my copy of the Quran, that unless a man is slain for spreading mischief in the land or for murdering his fellow man, then it would be as if he had destroyed an entire world, and likewise if he had saved a life, it would be as if he saved an entire world. In essence, the paraphrase means to take a life is to take away that person and all that individual meant to everyone they had ever known.

Osama bin Laden destroyed worlds entire, but in killing him, so have we. Let his death not be a rallying cry for extremists. It is my greatest fear that we have only just begun the raising up of an entire generation of "holy warriors".

The world has changed tonight. The question is, has it changed for better or worse?