Sunday night, America learned that the mastermind and financier of 9/11 had met his fate. So ends one small chapter in the ongoing war with radical Islam. It isn’t the first battle and it won’t be the last.
This nation has paid dearly in both blood and treasure in our quest to rid the world of those who practice a wildly driven militarism and cloak it in religion.
That fight is far from over. Questions over the pictures will go on ad nauseum. Memories of Mussolini hanging and grisly photos of abused American reporters and soldiers are evidence of war and its aftermath, but it is unnecessary for those to be labeled “American”. Our SEALS did their job. Period.
Releasing details of any high profile military mission may give some among us a rush of some sort, but it can also have a downside — furnishing critical information to the enemy and inspiring other would-be zealots to more acts of terrorism.
Every hour of every day, our brave men and women in the military put their lives on the line to keep us safe and violence away from our shores. Here at home, intelligence officers regularly thwart attacks. Because they are so good at their jobs, we may have a false sense of security.
My only concern is that our borders pose a glaring danger to all of us. There is no way of telling what people could carry across the border. Items aren’t limited to drugs. It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to posit a biological or nuclear weapon in a briefcase. In this world of nanotechnology, it doesn’t take a large vehicle to ship a lethal armament.
As with power, wealth can be a bane or a boon. Money used wisely yields benefit. Money used poorly exacts pain and costs lives.
Osama Bin Laden inherited $80 million from his father. It is a pity that he had not been reared with a sense of responsibility to those in need. You don’t have to look very far in this country to find wealthy Americans who willingly share, funding private foundations to help their brothers and sisters to better lives.
Instead, his mindset was one of war and aggression. It just goes to show you what happens when you give money to a thirteen-year-old with no firm grasp on reality and no true world view.
My father had a saying and it’s as true now as when he uttered it to me when I was a child. “If you don’t care and you can’t share, you’re nowhere.”
If we learn nothing more about Bin Laden’s life that ended with a bullet in a walled compound in Pakistan, we learn how important it is to bring up our children to respect money and a sense of responsibility in using it.
Western civilization hasn’t seen all challenges of this ongoing war. We need to have a firm resolve to triumph and it won’t happen quickly. Undoubtedly, those who lost family members on 9/11 or on the battlefield feel about Bin Laden’s death, but I think they must have a small measure of solace in it.
It isn’t over. We need to repeat that to ourselves every day. To do less is to ignore reality. Think about it.