"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

On the night they killed Bin Laden, I went down to Ground Zero with some friends and stood in the middle of a big crowd and watched people climb the stoplight. At the time, I saw nothing wrong with the scene. I still don't. It certainly wasn't our most mature moment as a nation, but such release is natural, expected almost. We had gone nearly ten years since 9/11, ten years fighting two wars against an enemy that wore no uniforms and knew no surrender. The celebration at Ground Zero was not so much a celebration of Bin Laden's death as it was a celebration of having finally won something in a war where winning had become commonly accepted as nearly impossible. They had, I think, reason to celebrate, even if they didn't know exactly what it was they were celebrating.

Still, every party has a pooper. In the hours and days that followed the triumph of SEAL Team Six in Abbottabad, critics made themselves vocally known, showing up on Facebook and Twitter to denounce the rampant "death celebration" sweeping the nation, quoting Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, Jr. in an argument for moderation.

Social media has, in a lot of ways, made a lot of people dumber. Paradoxically, the dumber we get, the quicker we are to realize when other people are being dumb. The Internet, it seems, has both laid bare our collective stupidity and inspired others to developed a heightened sensitivity to stupidity. Such was the case with Bin Laden: on one side, trigger happy, war weary mega-patriots danced in the streets; on the other side, self-righteous, pious do-gooders shook a collective finger in disapproval. I'd like to make clear at this point that I belong to neither group. They both annoy me equally. Hardly anything is as black and white as these two sides claim it to be, especially war, which is what this, in the end, is all about.

War is an ugly, tremendously terrible business. It's horrific, violent, bloody. Thousands die. As far as I'm concerned, there is no place for it or the people that make it. No war is more virtuous than any other, and war is never a just solution for any evil. That said, when we make a decision as a society to wage war on another people, we must all accept responsibility for it. We're not obligated to agree with it, but we've got to face the facts: we're doing it, and we've got to answer to it when things go wrong or, in this case, right.

Celebrating and dancing over the mangled corpse of your enemy is a solemn rite of war. It goes hand in hand with a more comprehensive premise of war: shoot your enemy before he shoots you. Had Bin Laden gunned down President Obama in the East Room, the militants of al-Qeada would've been climbing stoplights just as we did. Celebrating the death of a vanquished enemy is disgusting, reprehensible perhaps. But it isn't to be criticized, it's part of the package deal.

Of all the things we can think and do and say right now, the most considerate of all possible reactions is to consider the cost in human terms. The killing of Osama Bin Laden was, by almost any metric, the shallowest of victories. My personal metric of choice is human lives lost, specifically the civilian lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are people whose names we do not know, whose faces we never saw. Twitter and Facebook has had nothing to say these past ten years on the thousands of civilians sacrificed in the name of finding Bin Laden and defeating al-Qaeda. To claim the moral high ground now, in the flush of victory, is somewhat embarrassing to the do-gooders who had nothing to say about these tragedies.

It's disgusting to me that it took ten years and the paying of such a tremendous cost in human blood to track down a single elderly dialysis patient living in a barricaded compound in a suburb outside of Islamabad. Thousands of innocent lives later, we've got what we wanted. In the process, we've all forgotten who we were and what we said when we got into all this.

Osama is dead, justice has been done. It's good that he's gone. Maybe we shouldn't have celebrated his death, and maybe it's fine that we did. Nothing is black and white. Celebrate this victory, I suppose, but remember that the war wages on, that there are still battles yet to fight.

We aren't less human because we celebrate the death of an enemy. We are less human because of the price we paid to win that kill, because of the wars we started and the lives we destroyed in the process. If you want to criticize an injustice in all this, criticize that injustice. Had Bin Laden been beheaded on live TV in October 2001, none of us would be misquoting Mark Twain in a cry for moderation. Rather, we'd all be climbing stoplights, delighting in the smell of the blood of a fresh killed enemy, voting to install George Bush as emperor for life. To claim moderation now, having waged ten years of war, is hypocritical. Accept responsibility, end the war. Nothing else makes any sense.