The Kimmel Tribune

I’m on the fence about the whole Osama thing. On the one hand, I’m not the sort of person to celebrate anyone’s death, especially when it is an important figure. Like Hitler, I would have liked him to stand trial for his actions. Moreover, we hold these low level terrorists in Guantanamo for years, torturing them for information, and then we get the supposed leader and mastermind, and we just put a bullet in his head? Seems a poor choice, like more for show then as a responsible action.

On the other hand, he did advocate killing innocent people, and helped plan to kill innocent people, and, even according to his own son Omar, was kind of a dick. My own sort of evil nature tells me that people like that don’t deserve to live. Heck, I even think that sometimes about some asshole blowing by me at 90 miles an hour in their BMWs, so I think it is a poor basis for how to feel about the situation. I feel sure our personal morality is not to be found in the easiest of our emotions, and revenge is a very easy emotion indeed.

I came of age in the 1990s, and for most people of my own age, 9/11 was an important and memorable and horrifying day. But I think even more formative than that was the Challenger disaster. It was fourth or fifth grade, and the teacher had wheeled a television into our room. Every school age child in America was watching when it happened. Everyone was excited, and then everyone was scared. For many, it was our first taste of observable and certain death, and it was affecting. There was no one to demonize exactly. Just accidents and randomness and the risk of death faced by some people doing something pretty death-defying every time they strapped themselves in.

And I imagine, for someone in the early twenties, 9/11 is much the same event. Horrifyingly visible disaster and every authority figure saying it was Osama who did it, and needing to go to war because of it. Osama looms fairly large in their psyche as a boogeyman, and someone to be feared every day. I’m sure they heard that all through school. 9/11 happened at a very impressionable age for them. A time of life where you believe what your parents and teachers and the president says, because they are the authority, and all knowledge and morality comes from authority figures at that age.

I think this is a big reason behind the street celebrations on Sunday night. Especially on college campus’ across the nation, the students of America poured out and cheered because Freddy Krueger had finally met his end. To someone older, it seems weird and out of place, but I’m sure to a twenty year old, their psychic boogeyman has been destroyed and the relief was incredible.

For someone my age, 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum, but as a result of a century old problem that is the middle east. It happened as a result of foreign policy decisions in the western world, and as a means for fairly powerless people to get our attention. I was old enough to know that things happen for a reason, and that there is a lot of gray area when it comes to foreign policy. That terrorists can also be insurgents, or freedom fighters, or guerillas, or opposition parties, or even just disgruntled middle-class white guys. But that sort of talk doesn’t make sense to a 10 year old. It is easier to just point at someone and say “bad” and leave it at that.

From an American government perspective, I think Obama felt that he needed a victory, or that maybe just the American people needed a victory of some sort. Since 9/11, we have bogged ourselves down in now three sort of useless wars, with no clear objectives, an no real exit strategies.Osama killed ~3K of our people through his underlings, but we’ve sent over 6K of our people to their death in response, not to mention the hundred thousand dead Iraqis and Afghanis. Someone hit us with a rock and we responded with a bullet. And my religious faith doesn’t allow me to believe that an American person is worth more than a person of another country. An American jeweler is not worth more than an Iraqi one, like a jeweler who was killed today in Najaf in gunfire.

But the American people are weary of these wars where people keep dying and bad things keep happening, and where we can’t afford to fill our gas tanks or get enough jobs. I think the government felt that we needed something to feel better about, and it certainly seems to have worked.

Yesterday, I drove my family back to Ohio after a weekend in Maryland with the parents. Coming across the bridge over the Ohio river in Wheeling, WV, the first thing you see is a sign welcoming you to Ohio in large letters. In slightly smaller letters, it names John Kasich as our governor and Mary Taylor as the Lieutenant Governor. My wife made the comment, “They have to pay somebody to go around and change  all of those every time we elect someone new.” I sort of brushed it off saying that there wasn’t that many of those signs, so “…no big deal.” But afterward I got to thinking about it.

In Interstate terms (and I’m just guessing here), there are at least seven of these signs on the major highways (I’m welcome to someone correcting me). There are probably various others on non-Interstate, yet still major state routes, such as OH-50, OH-33, OH-35, etc., not to mention the National road (40). For the sake of argument, let us assume that there are 20 of these signs, which I think is probably conservative.

So a new governor takes office and the order goes out to change the signs. Does the governor’s office do this? Or more likely, it is one of those automatic, administrative things that no one has thought about for years. Maybe encoded in the Ohio Administrative Code. Anyway. The order goes out to the state printing service. Or maybe we have outsourced that to private interests already, and they proceed to print up these giant magnetic stickers to be placed on the metal signs throughout the state. Then they are delivered to various road crews in various counties, who proceed to dispatch guys to take take down the magnetic stickers of the old guy and put up the new ones. Now, anyone who drives into Ohio is sure to know who runs the joint.

I don’t know how much this costs. I doubt many people do. There are material costs, driving costs, labor costs, disposal costs, etc. In the near term, I’m sure these costs wouldn’t save the state budget, or even a particular school district, such as the Oregon school district outside of Toledo, who are facing a loss of up to $3M in operating budget over the next two years if Kasich’s budget passes. The point is not that eliminating changing the names on signs is going to save gobs and gobs of money, but rather, how many little things that we do add up to a huge amount of waste?

Of course, there is something to be said that it is a waste of time to go after pennies when there are people dealing in dollars. But to that I say that we are almost powerless to effect that sort of change, because we the people are not a giant business interest, and giant business interests are the only thing that affect elections in our country. Even you and a thousand other people can’t cobble together the same political clout that a poorly-positioned lobbyist with a wad of Franklin’s has, so why do we keep running up against that same wall? I don’t know the right answer, but maybe we can work on finding the areas that we can change and going after those, instead of breaking our backs trying to solve unsolvable problems. Maybe having Welcome to Ohio signs without our governor’s name on it will only save a couple of grand every six years, but if we find enough of those areas, they can add up to real savings.