He's Gone...But Nothing Has Changed

Is it just me or does the death of Saddam Hussein seem rather anti-climactic? I expected it to seem bigger, more monumental. For those of my generation, Saddam Hussein was the biggest, baddest man out there. Sure, there was also Slobodan Milosevec and Augusto Pinochet, who were pretty bad men, but they weren't, for those of us growing up in America, on the same-scale as Hussein. The US tacitly supported Pinochet, and we turned our back on Yugoslavia, so neither of these other two men played much into our collective conscious. But Hussein, he was the definition of bad, an awakening to those of us who were just children in the early 90s that there were people in the world capable of horrific things.

I remember writing in my journal during the first Gulf War about Saddam Hussein. I butchered the heck out of his name--I think it must have been the first Arabic name I'd ever come across--but I wrote about him. He was big enough to me at age nine that he made his way into my journal.

It's been over sixteen years since then. And Saddam has never really left our consciousness. The toppling of the statue of him in Iraq was momentous. The discovery of him hiding in a hole in Tikrit seemed huge. His death should have been big. But it just doesn't seem that way. He might be gone, yet nothing has really changed. Evil remains.