I spent half an hour getting ready today, 45 minutes on a bike in the rain (bad day to start riding again), 9:30-4:30 in Quill's coffee shop, and then finally I arrived at a nail place to get my first manicure thing. I'm actually going to post a brief blog about that later too.
I looked up at the bright flashing TV above me for the beginning 5 o clock news and held my mouth agape for about 5 minutes while the breaking news headline bore half the screen. I wondered how late I was to find out- nobody around me looked surprised. All of a sudden it made sense to me why that random chick at Quills went outside in the rain just to take a picture of the newspaper stand. And here I thought she just had some random thing for that, or was into photography......
Oh the life of social and cultural ignorance led by a med student. I didn't know about Libya until 3 days into it or something when Chris posted some article on how the Libyan government turned off their internet (and that's all it specified). I responded to his post- "....and why would a government feel the need to do this?" lol.
I think I was surprised because I had believed all the assumptions and jokes out there that Osama was going to die in a cave. In fact, I figured there was a chance he was dead already. So much for that. It is pretty nasty he has been catered to and playing golf this whole time... This is a nice Louis C.K. clip that I recently saw and I thought of during the broadcast:
http://tv.gawker.com/#!5621218 I can't embed it, but this guy is hilarious people. Please do yourself a favor and watch him sometime.
The news likes to post blog quotes and facebook comments these days, and they showed a few that were worth mentioning but one in particular I remember and appreciate: "The Bible says not to boast the death of our enemies."
I don't feel boastful. I feel surprised, proud for the outcomes this may mean for Obama's presidency, all of a sudden more understanding of why the Afghanistan efforts were continued after all... but mostly, I feel solemn about the circumstances of what brought us to this point, and about the widespread ignorance the entire 9/11 fiasco brought us, which will be further perpetuated in this breaking news.
The news went on with some surprisingly intelligent comments on the matter, the context of which I am unsure: "70% of Americans do not know a Muslim." "80% of Americans have not learned about the religion of Islam." Those numbers shock me...Sometimes I feel ignorant to just how ignorant the populations around me are. I want to believe that everyone can be and is internally virtuous, but a lack of understanding and exposure is so detrimental to the necessities of acquiring virtue... especially when it comes to culture and religion. Am I just a hippie with unrealistic ideals? Hmm, maybe according to just 80% of the country.
Why are people boasting on their facebook walls, making t shirts, videos, having patriot parties? Because we beat the "bad guy." The world of black and white, good and evil: of course that is the American view of the world. Just what we all learned as kids when we developed our concrete thought processes. Osama was wrong. But he beleived in this black and white philosophy too- hence he was an "extremist."
And of course now everyone is worried about a backlash from the extremists. What else can we expect but what happened with Tupac and Biggie? How many Muslims do people think the US has pissed off with this action? Muslims did not like Osama, and I am sure that there are just as many, if not many more, Muslims that are satisfied with this event than there are Christians (after all, they outnumber us by plenty). There will always be extremists, but they will not be any better at making offensive advances now then they were after 9/11.
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