The man is dead but his legacy lives on

So he's dead. Which is great, as far as I'm concerned.

But now what?

While the bickering over who gets credit and who acted improperly will go on for quite some time, we have a more critical issue staring us in the face.

How the fuck do we fix our country?

You remember America, right? Used to be a great place. Freedom was cherished. Citizen's rights were respected, for the most part. And government policy, as a general rule, did not set out to completely screw people over.

Then came 9/11.

That crazy fuck Bin Laden masterminded the single most deadly terrorist attack in our world's history. Nearly 3,000 perished that day. But something else died along with those innocent victims.

The American way of life.

It has been a subtle shift, for the most part. We've seen the Patriot Act slowly and systematically erode civil liberties. We've seen our economy become more and more focused on short term gains over long term health. We've beefed up our military and homeland security to unprecedented levels, without paying for any of it. And we've seen our political process slowly regress into a clusterfuck of stupidity where one political party has decided that destroying our president is their most important goal. And the other party has decided to castrate themselves and stand for nothing.

This is Osama's handiwork. And it will take a lot more than a couple of bullets to undue all of it.

We need to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan (and a lot of other places, too). We need to create a sensible homeland security policy that focuses on anticipating new threats instead of over-reacting to old ones. We need to rebuild our nation's infrastructure and prepare our economy for the inevitable impact of global warming. And we need to force corporate money out of the political process so we can start electing people who aren't complete money-grabbing whores with no regard for our country's future.

We can do this. We just have to give a shit.

Can't muster up any enthusiasm? Okay. Then we may as well dive down to the bottom of the ocean and pull up OBL's body, so we can strap it to the back of a boat, Bernie-style. Because until we start fixing all of these problems, Bin Laden is as good as alive anyway.