The Madness of Crowds; or, Yet Another Post Inspired By Current Events

I watched the news last night...

Wait. You know why, right? Anyway.

I watched the news last night with a sense that I wasn't feeling what I was supposed to be feeling.

I wrote that last sentence and then tried to write a follow-up about five times before coming up with this bit of nothing.

I can't just categorize my emotions around this in simple terms: jubilation, release, contemplation, cynicism, or what-have-you. I can't even say that I felt all of the above emotions after hearing the President's address. (I cracked wise about it on Twitter, of course, but you'd be forgiven if you missed it through the rest of the 140-character punditry.) I suppose I felt surprised when Lovely Girlfriend came back from a brief phone conversation with her mother to shout, "Turn on the TV! The US Government has assassinated Osama bin Laden." (Which I, of course, misheard and instantly panicked about.) I guess I was somewhat relieved to learn the few specifics that the President decided to impart about the events surrounding bin Laden's killing.

And then that crowd started gathering outside The White House. And MSNBC decided to show more and more of that live feed as the talking heads continued to analyze. And then the various crowds at Ground Zero and elsewhere became the news.

My doubt about my feelings stems from these moments.

I understand intellectually about how these crowds most likely gathered as a cathartic action. Many, many people have strong emotions surrounding the day that would become Patriot Day. A few of those people might have even lost someone because of the events on that day. Those people probably required and craved some sort of release, and perhaps they finally got that release with this news.

I kept looking at the broadcast of the crowds in front of The White House with a little concern, though. I caught myself muttering under my breath, "I don't like that. That's not good." Perhaps I've conditioned myself to distrust large groups of shouting flag-wavers. But, after a while, I started to not like what I was seeing of the crowds that kept being broadcast at me. It just seemed off.

Not that I have a much of a problem with a US special forces military group assassinating a major terrorist organization's former leader; my feelings around death and killing criminals can be best summed up as, "Go ahead, if that's the only realistic way to take care of the situation." (Lovely Girlfriend and I sometimes have spirited discussions on this point; I think my view makes me a bad liberal, but it's my view and I own it.) But, well...

Look. If this news makes you want to celebrate in the streets or whatever, that's your thing. I guess it isn't mine. I'm not-so-secretly glad that this particular terrorist is dead. Perhaps it would have been better if he had been taken alive, tried for war crimes, and punished under due process of international law. That didn't happen, and I'd be lying if I said that I'm not too sad about it, regardless. However, forced analogies to the celebrating crowds in the 1940s for the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan and the death of Adolf Hitler don't make me feel any better about group mentality. Even if it's just a spontaneous gathering of celebratory and relieved people, I look at this:

And I worry.