Osama Bin Laden: How Is This Solving Anything?

Dear Bloggie,
    By now you've probably heard that the U.S. killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist group Al Qaeda. Now many people are happy and are celebrating, but from the moment I heard about it and heard that all these people were happy, all I could think was "What gave us the right?"

    I'm not trying to justify his actions. Obviously he wasn't a very good person. He had issues and organized that worst attack on American soil to date, September 11. He killed thousands and thousands of people. But just because he seemed cruel in our eyes, doesn't mean we had any right to kill him. He had wives. Children. Siblings. He was a person and a human being. We have no right to take away his life. Capture him. Yeah. Give him a trial. Yeah. Give him so many life sentences that he will never ever see anything besides a prison for the rest of his life, yeah. But kill him. No.
 
     I'm very much against the death penalty, no matter what the crime. It's weird that I can believe in abortion and euthanasia, but I can't believe in killing criminals. Maybe it's because with abortion I see it as the women's choice since she the one who has to carry the baby for nine months. With euthanasia the person wants to die too. Plus, they are facing a death soon enough anyway. At least this way it can be done with the least pain. But the death penalty, your just killing them. It's not out of need or out of a want not to let the person suffer, but it's out of revenge. And then how they let the family watch the person be put to death. It's just horrible. And what happens if you have the wrong person? You can't go back and revoke the penalty. It's too late.

   Now in the case of Osama, there is most likely be no suddenly surfacing proof that he didn't kill all these people or that he was really innocent. Still, what gives us the right to kill him. Call me a hippie (which I sorta am, more and more each day I spend t art school, the hippie retreat of the world), but killing isn't going  to solve anything. Killing and killing and killing. That's all our world does. Why can't we all be peaceful and just love. Look at the hippies of the sixties. Yeah maybe they're were stoned most of the time, but so what? Hello, I go to art school; I know plenty of people who either smoke pot or have at least tried it. I know many people who very openly want it to be made legal. I'm not really going into what my view on it is right now (it would way too long and already this post is becoming longer then I originally expected) but I think the hippies were on to something.

    They just wanted peace and love. I wish their movement worked. I wish our world was at peace. I wish I didn't worry all the time that the plane I hear overhead may crash and kill me or others. I wish I never had to worry about riding a plane because the mere thought leaves me very paranoid. I wish I would never have to think of the possibility of World War III or that Al Qaeda may now want to get back at the U.S. for taking down its leader. I'm fifteen, I shouldn't be scared about these things.

    More then that, I wish I could say that I'm just some crazy paranoid teenager whose thoughts are nothing like her friends and fellow pupils. But I'm not. I'm not the only one who thinks these thing and I'm not the only one that worries and who is sacred. Adults can criticize my generation and say we're lazy and care more about TV and video games, but it's not true. We're a generation that has been exposed to the media since birth, leaving us very knowledgeable about the world around us. In some ways, this has robbed of parts of our childhoods. I was four at the time of 9/11. From an early age I saw our world at war. TV, war, news. My generation knows all about it. Most of us have our own opinions and voices. We don't all always use them, but we all have them. It sucks sometimes knowing so much about war. Knowing that you want so much but will most likely only get half of it. If we were hippies, we would never have to worry about any of this ever again.

In hopes that we can all get along and live as hippies,
here's some inspiration. My favorite song from ANY
musical EVER. I have this supreme want to just sing this
with my friends and the people I care about. Laughing and
singing and hoping that one day we (the human race) can
 let the sunshine and we can live happily in the sun like our
hippie predecessors dreamed of. When I die one day (In
a very, very, VERY long time) I want this song played at

                                        my funeral. Hippie until the end. :)

              ~XOXO,
                      Ariana