When hubby told me that he’d gotten a news-text saying Osama bin Laden was dead, I didn’t know quite how to feel? Happy? Elated? Celebratory?

My good Episcopalian, Midwestern upbringing would not allow me to feel happy about someone else’s death, and yet, our military finally “got him,” the guy who led an attack on our soil and killed almost 3,000 people.

My first thoughts were, “Oh, I hope we didn’t kill any children.” Just a day or two before, NATO forces had bombed a house in Libya that another dictator nut, Muammar Gaddafi, was supposed to be in, only the bomb allegedly killed Gaddafi’s son and three grandchildren instead.

I was mortified about the death of Gaddafi’s grandchildren. No matter who  granddaddy is, children should not die for his sins. As for the son, I felt sorry for him, too. What chance did Gaddafi’s son have to be a good guy if Poppa is a psychopathic killer?

White Trash

What amazes me is that after our military goes into the so-called mansions of the mujahideen, we see the purported terrorists in their underwear or PJs. We see their unmade beds and clothes strewn about. We see them rousted from sleep at midnight with their hair sticking up, or rutting around in a hole in the ground, or bloodied and shot in the head.

Mostly we see that these extremists, mujahideen — whatever you’d like to call them — are what my mother called “white trash.” My apologies for the phrase, but my very Anglo-Saxon mother was from a different era. When she called somebody “white trash,” that meant they were lower than any other race or status of human being.

Moreover, these fringe terrorists are gangsters. Low, low, low-class individuals who aim for cruelty, power, glory and money by destroying the lives of others. Clearly, they are mentally misguided, as well as morally misguided, and they’ve given Islam a bad rap. True Islam does not preach the behaviors these aberrant mujahideen employ to defend their religion. They’ve taken a few lines from the Qur’an and run amok with them far too long.

“White trash,” Mom would call them. Yes, Osama bin Laden was definitely that. There’s no better word for him, except maybe “dead.”