With Osama bin Laden’s death, we see the return of militaristic and nationalistic celebrations of a kind and scale that haven’t occurred much since the beginning of the Second Iraq War. While public opinion has turned against the cost (both human and monetary) of our endless foreign wars, the recent jubilation over the killing of bin Laden shows how close the flash point of American triumphalism lies to the surface of our psyches. In “What I Will” Suheir Hamad -writing against the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine- states her refusal to be complicit in the narrow-minded jingoism that powers our nation’s war machine. At this moment in history, when we have witnessed the destruction that our wars have inflicted -on the countries we have occupied and on our own country- its important to remember that killing one person (or any number of people) won’t stop the waning of our empire or end the cycles of violence that brought us to this point.
— Isaac Miller (Spoken Word Editor for The Progressive)