Reflections From a Murky Pond

Allegedly the Obama Regime planned and launched a military operation that killed the jihadi vermin, Osama bin Laden – or at least that is what Obama announced last night and what a large number of Americans believe.

Yet, due to a variety of reasons, a have some serious doubts as to the veracity of this claim.

Does it really matter though?

Whether it’s true and we’ve just exterminated Osama bin Laden or it’s false and Obama is perpetrating another lie, it’s highly unlikely that Osama bin Laden is still alive at this time.

Either way, most Americans and many people in the rest of the world believe that a US Special Forces “kill team” exterminated him on Sunday. This will have certain effects, some good and some less so depending upon your ideology:

1. Americans are happy with this thought. Our forces killing Osama bin Laden give them orders of magnitude more closure and joy than his dying of kidney failure or having been assassinated in an Al-Qaeda power struggle would. Sometimes “at least he’s dead” just isn’t enough.
2. A lot of people across the world are going to have a better chance of understanding that, if they harm Americans, we will get to them and kill them no matter how long it takes. We won’t stop until they’re dead. That’s nothing other than a good thing in this day and age.
3. True or false, claiming the kill for Osama bin Laden at this time gives the US a “Victory Condition” that Obama can exploit to pull all or most of our forces out of Afghanistan.
4. Whether the facts as presented by Obama’s people are fully accurate, they’re partially false and he cynically manipulated the date of Osama bin Laden’s extermination for political gain, or this whole thing is a well constructed lie, the fact remains that Obama’s going to get a huge surge in popularity over this.

This is one of those cases where perception is more important than reality. Does it really matter if we just exterminated Osama bin Laden as long as a large enough majority of people believe that we did and it’s not in anyone with the power to act’s vested interests to prove it false?

In the wake of Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people — six of whom were killed, including a 9 year-old girl — in Tucson, AZ on Saturday, January 8, 2010 I’m left in an odd quandary. Truth be told, I’m searching for outrage within myself but finding only a mild sadness, a lingering frustration, and more than a little ennui.

Obviously, normative American society says that I should be outraged, especially since a child was murdered. That point was made quite clear, though no such clarification was needed.

I am going to unfriend you on FB, don’t take it personally – I am sure you will not. If you cannot muster up feelings for a 9 year old child as collateral damage, then my unfriending wont ruffle a hair on your head.

The somewhat worrisome thing is that I can’t seem to summon up any significant feelings for the murdered Christina Taylor Green or any of Loughner’s other victims. I can’t even seem to call up more than a certain level of disgust with “opportunistic feeding” that been done by politicians, demagogues, and pundits in the wake of the massacre.

So I’m left searching for outrage but not finding any.

Some days, and many more nights, it strikes me odd how we humans make arbitrary divisions of time. We as a species compartmentalize time into a plethora of units that have no bearing upon anything but how we perceive time and level set our goals.

This has no bearing upon the greater reality but seems essential the working of the human mind.

A more fluid and/or holistic view of time actually seems detrimental to our happiness and sanity. Without these goal points in time that we’ve created we seem to descend into depression, frustration, and madness in fairly short order.

This strikes me as both odd and counter-survival oriented. It does seem to be the way we’re built though.

It is a long recurring theme, the call to have no regrets and/or to live one’s life without regret. Both the young and the middle-aged seeking to find their lost youth herald this idea as a measure of courage and personal growth.

It is one of the more laughable ideas that I’ve heard issue from the mouths of fools and people trying to sell me something. It also would be dangerous if generally achievable.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that only the severely mentally deficient and/or damaged, the most shallow of narcissists, and total sociopaths could ever hope to achieve a life with no regrets. Let’s concentrate instead upon those deluded fools who might attempt this largely in vain.

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Both as individuals and as societies we seem very concerned with ourselves and our importance. Each crisis is of horrific magnitude because it impacts us and the world we’ve created with our perceptions and imagining to surround us.

At times it is beneficial to be given a reminder – hopefully a gentle one – that much of this is illusory, and what isn’t, is likely transitory. The universe will continue its stately precession to oblivion long after we and everyone we ever loved or hated has long since died and been forgotten.

While humbling, this should also be a source of comfort for us. True, all of our efforts will eventually come to naught and be erased from the fabric of the universe by the erosion of time. Yet, so too will the effects of the efforts of our enemies and the consequences of our failures fade away, leaving not a trace of themselves upon the universe.