Conduct your triumph as a funeral.<\/i> –Lao Tzu<\/p>\n
I don’t think I’d call myself a pacifist, but I’m skeptical about all forms of violence, from the death penalty to war. So, putting aside initial flippancy, my reaction to the news of OBL’s killing is complicated.<\/p>\n
Ultimately resorting to violence is a failure: in this case a long, tangled history of failure, in which many hands — ours and others’ — have blood on them. But there’s an undeniable sense of relief that a man who killed thousands of my fellow New Yorkers, and would have done it again if he could, is no longer a threat.<\/p>\n
Yet I’m not interested in dancing in the streets; that seems tribal and juvenile. And then again, I’m not going to tell anybody else not to.<\/p>\n
I also realize this isn’t a magical End of All Terrorism (or End of All War) moment. But I’m going to permit myself to hope that with the demise of this figurehead, Al Qaeda will be more fragmented and less powerful… and also that already-waning support from the American public for continuation of the almost-perpetual war will further diminish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Conduct your triumph as a funeral. –Lao Tzu I don’t think I’d call myself a pacifist, but I’m skeptical about all forms of violence, from the death penalty to war. So, putting aside initial flippancy, my reaction to the news of OBL’s killing is complicated. Ultimately resorting to violence is a failure: in this case […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookofsand.net\/voltage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}