Reactions are important. I learned that early when my daughter would show me a new dress, or haircut, or artwork she’d labored over. When she asked what I thought, “Nice,” just didn’t cut it.
My face needed to curl up, my eyes glow and my rear levitate off the chair to provide sufficient affirmation that she had indeed made the right choice or achieved the level of excellence that she sought.
Norman Jameson
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Since the nation has curled up its collective face in a big, enthusiastic celebration of both the military action that killed Osama bin Laden and Osama bin Laden’s actual death, I’ve wondered why my own reaction to the news was simply sadness.
I didn’t rejoice that he was dead. I was just sad for his horrible life, his wasted, mean, vicious, misguided, despicable life and for the thousands of deaths he caused.
I was sad that the most powerful nation on earth considered it an extraordinary military operation to fly into a compound, shoot bin Laden and carry him out. He’d been there six years, in the shadow of Pakistan’s top military training center.
Jack Bauer could have done it by himself in 24 hours.
President Obama called the operation one of the most significant military operations in the history of the United States. Well, I suspect McArthur, Patton, Grant, Eisenhower and George Washington would raise objections to such hyperbole. But the president has been taking a lot of hits lately so I’ll give him some leeway on the hyperbole freeway.
But how to express my sadness, how to burrow to its root for the truffle of insight that surely lies there? I didn’t know exactly until talking to J. Alfred Smith recently. Smith is 80 years old, pastor emeritus of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif. Oakland is one of the most urban, dense and scary cities in the country, at least by reputation in the rural, white, southern hinterlands where Smith spent the past five months.
He was Gardner-Webb University’s first scholar in residence in a place called Boiling Springs, N.C. There are more people in an Oakland housing project than in Boiling Springs.
Smith came to Allen Temple about the same time the infamous Black Panthers were organizing and popularizing “Black Power” and frightening the white middle class who thought they held and controlled all the power. Smith worked with them in their community services and won some of them to the Lord. He advocates prophetic justice and raises the issue of justice to those in authority.
I asked Smith about bin Laden’s death and he suddenly gave voice to my own undefined sadness. He said that based on John 3:16, God loved Osama bin Laden, that bin Laden carried some of the image of God in himself as a human being who would never have drawn his first breath without the power of God.
When such a creation dies, the appropriate reaction is sadness.
“There should be lamentation,” Smith said.
Bin Laden’s death was necessary as he was an infection in the human body, and it brings salve to many a wound. But any death, especially one directly initiated by other human beings, is cause for lamentation.
Norman Jameson is a contributing writer for the Religious Herald and is reporting for Associated Baptist Press on an iterim basis. He is based in Raleigh, N.C.