Editor,
Regarding your recent column “Good Riddance”:
Well, your attack on Osama bin Laden shows the usual tendency to go for the easy targets: He’s a notorious villain and caused the 9/11 fatalities.
That’s a comic book kind of political analysis, but like comic books it’s popular because it requires no thought.
When we look at his communiques, we see that he had serious and thoughtful reasons for his hatred: the U.S. support with arms and money of Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people (though Arabs had no part of the Holocaust) and the stealing of their lands; the support throughout the Middle East of dictators set up by the U.S. to allow wealth to be controlled by a foreign government (the U.S.).
Bin Laden no doubt saw Al Qaeda as a fighting patriotic force and encouraged armed attack on what he saw as an enemy of the Arab world.
Our disgust with the situation should not be aimed at Osama bin Laden — after all he’s a piker when it comes to numbers of deaths caused — but at the heinous “leadership” this poor country has been saddled with, which has led inexorably to the deaths of thousands of our own young men — for absolutely nothing but greed and despotism — along with the crimes against humanity committed against Iraq, a country which had nothing at all to do with 9/11 and amounting to a figure like 107, 152 civilian deaths up to 2010.
Osama bin Laden may have at least been a patriot. We have no patriots in positions of power. We have an oligarchy of mad wealth at the top who owe no allegiance to anything but their own filthy desires, and an uneducated and unenlightened electorate.
The average worker in this country is drowning in debt with no social services to speak of, no education and no jobs worth anything and is watching the monies of the country being used for weapons of mass destruction abroad.
Most of the corporations pay no taxes into the coffers of this nation. Bank of America hasn’t paid taxes in years.
Neither has Verizon.
Their money is safe in their own pockets. Most of us only have holes in ours.
Let’s not waste time patting ourselves on the back for finally “taking down” bin Laden. He will have had the last laugh if we do nothing to change the course this country is pursuing, a course which will only lead to our own destruction.
“Anna Livia Plurabelle”
