Good Riddance

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." 
                                   Jean de La Fontaine

Osama bin Laden is dead.  His compound in Pakistan raided by Navy Seals, in what's got to be one extraordinary operation, and taken out of this world by a bullet in the head. Put down like you'd put down a mad dog. Put down like a mobster who had skimmed the till from his fellow mobsters. Put down like the murderous thug he really was. 

Good.  No heroic last stand with drama and flames and an audience of the faithful.  Just confusion, fear, a stunning firefight, then a bullet in the brain.  An easy death for a man who masterminded the death of thousands, so many of whom had long agonizing minutes to peer into their own terrible fate and mourn their own deaths.  No time for fearful, frantic telephone calls to his loved ones to tell them good bye before his towers fell.  Just a quick, easy bullet to the brain.

Isn't it always thus?  The architect of such enormous suffering always gets the easy path out of this world in what too often turns into a pale footnote. President Obama said that "justice has been done."  But in this imperfect world, justice is never done.  Osama's death can never atone for what he has done.  His justice will come from Allah, and from what I know, that justice will be fierce and terrible. 

Good.  Meanwhile, the busy world goes on.  The media circus is well under way.  I can only hope that in the Muslim world, it will begin to dawn on the people there that the power to change the world lies in their cell phones, not in box cutters and bombs strapped to children.  The transformation already underway in the so-called Arab Awakening offers just such a hope that Osama will remain a discredited footnote -- a warning that evil can arise in the guise of a holy man who, in reality, violates every precept his holy book espouses.  Such phonies never seem to know that the arc of even rough justice eventually prevails. And that the malicious murderers among us always end up in the discredited dust bin of history. With a bullet in their brains or a noose around their necks.

Osama's body was buried at sea.  No shrine for this murderous bum. Good riddance.  Chronos has him now and Allah will judge him. He has earned his fate.

Now we can start laying bets as to how soon the Birthers will start the rumor that President Obama made this whole thing up, the body was a fake, and they'll start demanding he offer up proof via DNA samples.