On Revenge and Jubilation
President Barack Obama's gesture of closure at Ground Zero on Thursday was a formal and serious show of mourning -- quite a contrast from the gleeful outbursts and street parties around the country earlier in the week.
President Barack Obama’s gesture of closure at Ground Zero on Thursday was a formal and serious show of mourning — quite a contrast from the gleeful outbursts and street parties around the country earlier in the week. What are we to make of the latter reaction to news of Osama bin Laden’s demise? –KA
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“It was appropriate to go after Bin Laden, just to try to cut the head off that serpent, but I don’t think it’s decent to celebrate a killing like that,” said George Horwitz, a retired meat cutter and Army veteran in Bynum, N.C.
Others were much more critical. “The worst kind of jingoistic hubris,” a University of Virginia student wrote in the college newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. In blogs and online forums, some people asked: Doesn’t taking revenge and glorying in it make us look just like the terrorists?
The answer is no, social scientists say: it makes us look like human beings. In an array of research, both inside laboratories and out in the world, psychologists have shown that the appetite for revenge is a sensitive measure of how a society perceives both the seriousness of a crime and any larger threat that its perpetrator may pose.
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The events of Sept. 11, 2001, form a pivot point in our history and collective imagination, separating what we recall, however naively, as the relative quiet of the late 20th century from the endless war on terror that still grips and shapes the 21st. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, separate what we recall as the relative quiet of the late 20th century from the endless war on terror that still grips and shapes the 21st.
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