Archive: Opinions

Two momentous things happened this week.  Osama bin Laden was killed.  And Fred Voss spoke at Lansing High School.  The former killed thousands of people all around the world, including almost three thousand Americans in one day.  The latter survived a nightmare in which 6 million of his fellow Jews were massacred along with countless other people.  Both are about insane despots who wanted to mold the world to their own dark visions.

I'm going to admit that I was annoyed how many Facebook friends took the warm and fuzzy approach, misquoting Martin Luther King by saying "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."  And I have to admit to feeling juvenile pleasure when the national media reported that the quote was from a Facebook user named Jessica Dovey.  She made that statement in a Facebook post, and then put a King quote in quotation marks.  It went viral when Penn Gillette, of the comedy/magic duo Penn and Teller, tweeted her post with the quotation marks removed.

So why was I annoyed?  First because so many people were sloppy about what they were willing to report over and over and over.  Second, because the misquote became one of many side-shows that distract from an important victory in our country's war against terrorism.  And finally because I think Mr. Bin Laden deserved to be killed.  In fact, if he could be killed 3000 times I think it would be a beginning of a just retribution for the horrible acts he committed and inspired.

This is not a perfect world, and what he did was real, made the lives of millions of people a lot worse than they had been, starting with the families of those killed, and ending with all of us.  Our economy was shattered, the airline industry was nearly destroyed, our national pride was severely dented, and our sense of security and well being was shattered.  The American Dream became a shadow nightmare.

There were plenty of sideshows within minutes of President Obama's speech announcing Bin Laden had been killed.  Of course many of them were political.  I am not an Obama fan myself, but I think he gave a really decent speech.  He took responsibility, he gave credit to American servicemen who conducted the raid, he explained why it served justice, he avoided hyperbole.  It was appropriately understated.

Predictably the social networks were immediately full of posts excoriating him for taking credit, and dissing President Bush (who didn't actually say anything) for taking credit.  Self-appointed pundits doubted it was Bin Laden who was killed, while others complained that Americans didn't respect Pakistan's sovereignty, or that America botched its attempt to honor Muslim burial tradition.  More subdued commentators noted that his death doesn't end terrorism.

With all the side shows it's hard to see what's going on in the center ring.  Bin Laden's death certainly won't stop terrorism, but it is powerfully symbolic.  Ten years of not capturing and killing him stuck in the craw of America.  He was the face of terrorism, and his death is now a symbol that the forces of good will prevail.

One of those forces of good is Fred Voss, a Holocaust survivor who has spent a lifetime speaking out against hate and Hitler's fierce attack on Jews and the world at large.  Voss speaks at lansing High School each year to tell his story of escaping the Nazis while friends and family were murdered, robbed, and worse, he hopes people will remember why they shouldn't do that.  The Holocaust was one of many events in history where good prevailed over evil, but not before evil accomplished a lot of really bad things.  Voss makes it real, because it was real for him.  And he is such a powerful speaker that he makes it real for us.  Voss doesn't preach against Germany.  But he fiercely despises the power of hate.

I especially like hearing him speak at the high school because he strikes a chord with the students who never heard about the Holocaust the way Voss tells it.  He was about their age when he experienced it.  As Voss gets older and begins to slow down it's up to these students to tell two people who will each tell two people, and so on so that maybe, finally, once and for all humanity will learn from history.

When you look at the horrors in places like Darfur, and the unspeakable things terrorists have accomplished within our borders and beyond, you start to think that this learning from history thing is overrated.  So many of us live our lives, try to be good people, try to build things in our communities to make them better.  And so many use God and virtue to twist morality and rationalize hurting people and tearing things down.  It's frustrating, but the stories have to be told or, I believe, things would be much worse.  Voss is the anti-terrorist, illustrating in no uncertain terms that doing the right things for the right reasons is the right way to live.

It's impossible when mulling these events not to think of J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings or even J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter.  These are among the most popular modern stories, in a way, because they do what Voss does.  They tell of epic battles between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of good.  We pay dearly for that triumph, and part of that is killing really bad people.  It's not all black or all white.

There is some good in the bad and some bad in the good.  But overall we shouldn't be distracted by the sideshows where the good the bad and the misguided are all mixed up and distracting from that center ring where good triumphed -- just a little -- over evil this week.

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