So here we are. Osama bin Laden - terrorist, religious fundamentalist and angry rich guy - has been pronounced dead by the United States government. Hurray for that, I suppose, but I’m not particularly excited or encouraged by the world’s reaction to this news. I tried very hard this morning (yeah, for like an hour - ed.) not to express any opinions about the announcement, because I really didn’t want to invite others’ indignation upon myself. Unfortunately for all of us, the emotional forces at work here are a bit too clear, the trend too noticeable, and the bloodlust too sickening for me to just keep my mouth shut. I don’t imagine my writing this will accomplish much of anything, but perhaps, if nothing else, it will allow me to move on to things of more immediate importance.

I should begin by saying that I’m not belittling the strategic significance of bin Laden’s death, nor would I claim that he should have been spared the justice that was (allegedly) visited upon him in Abbottabad. I will not discuss the very real possibility that he is still alive, or that he may in fact have been several men hiding behind a common identity. I will speak on the assumption that he’s actually deceased, but if he releases another video to declare that he still draws breath, I will not pretend to be surprised.

Know also that I despised the man. I have no love for religious fundamentalists of any persuasion, even less for violent ones, and nothing but contempt for those whose crusades lead them to order the slaughter of innocent thousands on crisp fall mornings. I was on a Hudson Valley hilltop on September 11, 2001. I saw the smoke. I heard the wailing of those whose loved ones were lost. I witnessed my mother’s near-fatal descent into depression at the loss of the building, the office and the company where she had once worked for years, though she’d long since moved on to other things.

That afternoon, when I spoke with my father, he said: “Remember this day. Today, everything changes. Nothing will ever be the same.” I don’t know if even he realized just how right he was.

They say that history moves in circles, and today’s event has only served to highlight how multifarious and all-encompassing this notion truly is. Some have pointed out that bin Laden apparently died on the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death, which is perhaps appropriate. Do I believe that the US military may have fudged the date by a few days (a discrepancy conveniently sidestepped by his burial at sea) in order to gain an emotional victory at home? Of course I do, but such is the reality of top-secret military operations, and I suppose Obama needed the charisma boost after the embarrassing spectacle of Donald Trump’s “birther” movement.

But as circular as the events themselves may be, it is a very different world - and very different people - reacting to the death of a violent, morally bankrupt leader. Only three days ago, a famous rich white dude (who seems like an okay guy, all things considered) got married in a lavish ceremony that brought the United Kingdom to a near-standstill in celebration, and now the United States is celebrating with similar enthusiasm the death of a single human being. I’ll let my good friend and colleague Sam Mathis put this into perspective:

When a man endangers the lives and wellbeing of others, it is the responsibility of caring and courageous people to do something. All situations given their own careful consideration, that ‘something’ may involve the use of lethal force. Under no situation is the death of a man the cause for celebration. Under no circumstance is the death of a man a joyous occasion, regardless of the nature of that man’s character.

The argument I’ve heard most often in defense of this behavior is that it’s okay for us to do it because the people of Afghanistan did it on 9/11. It was wrong for them to do it because they’re evil, but we’re the good guys and we suffered, dammit. Those supporting this argument, in a disappointing and utterly transparent display of using human suffering to appease their own bloodlust, will claim that the Americans who lost their loved ones on 9/11 should be celebrating the death of the man responsible.

Remember, however, that many of the Afghan extremists who celebrated the fall of the towers had lost their own family members to US-led military operations during the Cold War, and the Taliban’s attack on American soil was as much a cultural victory for them as bin Laden’s death is for us. There are no “good guys” here, and there never were. In a recent Facebook thread, Kendall Davis explained it thus:

It feels eerily evocative of the latter days of Rome, in which people were easily seduced by illusions. Osama’s death, while important for justice, does nothing to bring back the people who died during 9/11 or in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only way to honor the dead is to live a life worthy of them… not to celebrate this illusion.

Human beings have been murdering each other on the battlefield, assassinating each other’s leaders, raping each other’s women and enslaving each other’s children for centuries upon centuries of unspeakable horror and death, and every nation on this sad, beautiful Earth has the blood of thousands on its hands. You don’t get to point your finger and petulantly declare “they started it”, because no one started it. This is all the same brand of cruelty that has plagued humanity since the first cities were built between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The vicious, heartbreaking pattern of war and revenge has followed us down through generations, and still - still, in this supposed age of enlightenment - we lack the strength to break the cycle. We repeat the mistakes of our fathers, and our fathers’ fathers, and so an unbroken chain of fatal mistakes reaches back unto the first moment that a human being committed violence upon another.

Some months ago I created a character - a Finnish soldier named Arto Vaeltanen - whose main purpose was to provide a philosophical lens for a series of stories I’m writing about humanity’s turbulent near future. Upon seeing the news of bin Laden’s death, I heard Vaeltanen’s voice in my head: “The trouble with war is that it’s easier than peace.” I then proceeded to quote him on the internet and thus completely destroy my credibility, but hey. Win some, lose some.

Then we come to the fiction of our hunt for bin Laden, the ongoing narrative that has become a hitching post for the dreams of a thousand neoconservative mouthpieces, and once again the past rears its ugly, pustulent head.

“We are safe once again,” the pundits declare. “For the first time since September 11th, Americans no longer have to live in fear.” This massive investment of malice, this all-encompassing attribution of an entire ideology to a single human being, is the culmination of a cycle that began with the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945.

When the leader of Germany’s Third Reich died in a bunker in Berlin, the Nazi regime had already been defeated. Hitler was disgraced, pathetic and utterly helpless without an army of goose-stepping stormtroopers at his command. His death served as a symbol of Allied victory, and the clear, unmistakable evil of the Nazis would eventually become the inspiration for dozens of fictional villains during the twentieth century. The Imperial officers of Star Wars even mimicked the Nazi uniform, down to the leather jackboots and inflexible posture.

But our cultural interpretations of evil inherited a fatal flaw from the defeat of Nazi Germany: the notion that an enemy’s power lies exclusively within its leadership. When Hitler died, the Nazis were already finished, but somewhere this understanding of cause and effect became reversed. When Sauron was defeated in The Return of the King (written shortly after the end of World War II), his vast, uncountable army was swallowed up by the earth at the Black Gate of Mordor. When Emperor Palpatine and his Death Star were destroyed in Return of the Jedi, the entire Galactic Empire basically rolled over and gave up.

Art imitates life, but shortly thereafter life imitates art, and something always gets lost in translation. America’s reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden shows that we have allowed this creative license to distort the way we look at real-world conflict. When we associated Hitler’s death with the defeat of the Nazis, we created a template for vanquishing evil in fiction. Now we have begun to apply this template to the real world, and we have abandoned all perspective in the process. George W. Bush invoked the “Axis of Evil”, making our enemies out to be comic book supervillains with secret underground lairs and a nihilistic hatred for freedom qua freedom. Today, we have assassinated the figurehead of an organization that will no doubt revere him as a martyr, and somehow we expect that everyone who hates us will simply lay down their weapons and declare “Congratulations! You Win!” We’re playing games with the world, and frankly it’s a terrifying thing to watch.

“We feel safe now,” we say. “We can sleep at night. We are no longer threatened.” Threatened by whom? By Osama bin Laden, personally? The man has an army, for fuck’s sake. Killing him is like scoring a slam dunk against the manager of a basketball team. There are still thousands of religious extremists who want us all dead in the name of their jihad, and now they have another reason to hate us.

Yes, I do believe that bin Laden was rightfully eliminated, but this is not “ding dong, the witch is dead.” It’s more like “okay, nice job, now can we please get back to patching things up with the rest of the world?” The (inconvenient) truth is that it’s going to take a lot of work for humanity to survive the rest of this century without being wiped out by global war, famine or environmental collapse. The death of Osama bin Laden has accomplished very little in the face of this, and frankly I think it’s ridiculous to be having a grand ol’ street party when we really should be keeping our noses to the gods damned grindstone and striving to better ourselves lest our complacency lead directly to mutually assured extinction. We don’t get to celebrate when there’s work to do.

As the eminent Ben Bassak put it…

…maybe this is a turning point. Maybe we can once again unite behind a common victory, pull our troops out of the Middle East (and ultimately all foreign bases) and slash our military budget by billions, while reinvesting it in applied science, education, clean energy and infrastructure! Right, guys?…. Right?……..

The human race is not okay. We need to stop patting ourselves on the back for killing each other, and start putting real effort into not destroying ourselves. And I really, really don’t want to end up saying “I told you so.”

Don’t get caught up in the frenzied carnival of death and bloodshed. Acknowledge the assassination of a powerful and corrupt human being, see the small victory for what it is, and carry on with your integrity intact. Future generations will thank you for not contributing to the cycle of violence.

I have written for too long and said too little. I shall stop here, get to bed and tell my girlfriend that I love her. Because that’s what actually matters.