My thoughts on Bin Laden's death

There has been a lot of talk flying on the media about the death of Osama Bin Laden from should they show his picture to was it fair to shoot an unarmed man to blah, blah, blah. I posted one comment on Facebook and it set off a nationwide (literally) debate between people that have never met and lasted for days. Not that I like to set off that much conflict, but I was kind of proud that my single thought could spark that much interest.

Obviously much of how our society has functioned over the past ten years has been strongly influenced by this man and I know I had given up hope that he was ever going to get caught so this event has certainly taken my by surprise. Some that I have spoken to are of the opinion that we are safer with him gone. I am not so easily convinced. I am certain that Al Quaida will continue on. Any organization of such power has built in backup systems in case its leader is lost. The US Government is the most obvious example that comes to mind. Bin Laden was not a nice person, but he was not dumb enough to assume that he was invincible and I am sure he had some kind of "in case I go on to my 67 (0r whatever the number is) virgins in the sky" plan in place for a replacement to take over.

The newest opinion I read was that the death of Bin Laden should have been kept secret for a certain period of time to allow the military longer time to evaluate the material in his compound. The writer of this editorial felt that the rapid announcement was only a way for Obama to gain popularity points. Now he is withholding the photographs of Bin Laden for his own gain as well. My guess is that the writer is not an Obama fan and needed to find something to criticize him on. Tell the public now or tell them later, they will get the news, and this is the kind of news that they have waited for a long time.

Personally I think that it is a silly thing to worry about. There are too many other things going on in the world to worry about minutia. I still maintain we are not safer as I mentioned above. Al Quaida has strong holds in Yemen and Somalia and do not need orders from Bin Laden anymore. The world is not a better place. There are something like 6 billion people on the planet. Killing one bad person is not going to make that much of a difference. Maybe I feel better that he is gone, and I know that a lot of people certainly do but if we let one bad person have too much influence on our life, we will let him win.g