Is this what justice feels like? This gnawing pit in the bottom of my stomach, this screaming in my subconscious that this goes against everything I was ever taught in Sunday School growing up?

Yay us. Go us. We killed a man today. All hail us.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending the things that man did, although it amazes me the number of people who, now that we’ve broken down the order in the country he formerly ruled, have called for tactics similar to those the deceased employed, somehow failing to grasp that there isn’t a sliding scale. Those tactics are either evil or necessary (or both), but they’re not pure evil when one man does them, but a distasteful necessity if we were to do them.

Nevertheless… A man is dead. At our hands. And many in the news media and the so-called “blogosphere” seem almost giddy with satisfaction.

Is this what justice feels like?

Or is this what vengeance feels like? What cold, unfeeling, politically motivated strategizing, one more death heaped on top of thousands of US troop deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, all ostensibly in retribution for thousands more deaths on our shores, deaths which had nothing to do with this war or any of these additional deaths, even the one which so many are celebrating today.

Is this “Christian Morality”? As we tell ourselves we’re fighting the violent barbarism of radical Islam, we kill a man in direct defiance of one of our majority religion’s ten most fundamental Commandments. Are Islam’s adherents really all that much worse than Christianity’s, when neither side’s radicals (or even rank and file) seem to pay any real attention to what their religion tells them to DO?

Is this what justice feels like?

Or is this mob mentality, the psychosis of people, shocked into unison, driven onward by lies, now acting in ways that few of those in the mob would if left to their own devices, if they had not given over their individuality to the group mind, the group consciousness, the group action?

Today, we killed a man. Not a good man. And not directly. But we were pulling the strings. Another life has been added to our tally. More blood is on our national hands.

Is this what justice feels like?

I had really thought it would feel more noble than this.