Unlike the rest of the country who seemed to be up and around watching baseball, I was asleep when the news came to light originally, and didn’t find out until the dulcet tones of the NPR newsreader woke me from the speaker of my alarm clock.

The story I heard first upon waking at 5am this morning was primarily dealing with the spontaneous celebrations at significant locations around the country; gatherings at the WTC plaza and outside the White House. I heard the sounds of the revelers, and that probably colored my first impression a bit, at least initially.

What I heard on the radio this morning honestly put me off a little bit. Not that the man’s gone; I’m not going to mourn him. Though the the thought of spontaneous rallies featuring crowd surfing and beach balls bouncing about arising at the news of somebody being dead just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even if the dead guy was a criminal asshole responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

It’s just really ugly, even if it’s sort of understandable. Does anyone else out there have these sort of conflicted feelings?

Anyway, putting that aside, I will say that it’s generally a good thing that this particular “mission” was finally “accomplished” so to speak, and that it was accomplished, by all accounts, with no particular loss of American or uninvolved civilian lives. For our side, anyway, it was the best resolution to the culmination of a generally unpleasant situation all around, and those involved in the operational planning and deployment should be commended for a job well done.

Besides the symbolic significance, though, I don’t expect a whole lot to change; it’s not like Bin Laden’s death will bring Al Queda crashing to insignificance; he started the organization, but it’s really a franchise operation. Just as killing the CEO of the McDonalds corporation won’t immediately shut down the network of independently owned McDonalds restaurants, knocking off Bin Laden won’t shut down all the various Al Queda branches across the world. Doesn’t mean it’s not a victory, but the various wars and military misadventures in the Middle East aren’t going to end any time soon.

In any case, though, it DOES have symbolic significance, and symbols have their own kind of power. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next as events continue from here, but I’m going to hope that clear, rational, and most of all, peaceful heads are the ones who win out in guiding the way.

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Of course, politically, this will likely lead to generally good things for the current administration, I hope. It’s certainly going to be a hard thing for the opposition to turn around into something bad for the President. Again, I hope it leads to positive, rational things instead of more fearmongering and time wasting.

One has to admit that this picture really is pretty funny, though.