#but as a direct representative of a particularly loathsome side of the discourse

[mercurymusing]

This gets to the heart of a deeply frustrating conversation (debate?) I had about this earlier today.

The setting, context, people involved, and format constrained the conversation (work chat) but also made some responses harder to take.

I'm not personally convinced Bushnell's death will even change anything! It's deeply tragic, but mostly in the way it'll slip out of the news cycle in a couple of weeks! And I'm fundamentally atheist in a way that makes suicide incomprehensible to me. If I'm ever that tired of my life I'll liquidate everything and see how far I can get backpacking before it runs out. Freezing to death in an exotic ditch after seeing a bit of the world is still better than nothingness, if I was determined to do that kind of thing to my loved ones. That is to say, at the nasty hollow heart of me, down where the wet reeds of my best intentions torturously wear new angles into the rusted cast iron of my model of the world, I believe this was the pointless death of an unimaginative man who couldn't dream up a better option.

Up at the level where I try to be a person and try to respect others as people with their own iron frames, it was still a surprisingly sharp betrayal to see someone say "well that was a stupid thing to do".

Like. For various reasons, suicide is something this group talks around frequently. Queer kids, mental health, veteran welfare, and even active service member suicide rates are a background hum of many of the conversations we've had. This is a group that's not by default very flippant about the subject. More than that, this is a group that fundamentally believes in self determination, on a few axes.

So the sheer disrespect was shocking, for a moment. Not just confusion, or condemnation of the statement being made, or fluttering over copycats, or sighing over the waste of life. Bare contempt for the idea that this kind of extreme gesture could be meaningful, and worse, a kind of contempt that someone could believe in this kind of gesture far enough to pull it off.

I'm an optimist in many ways, but of the resigned flavor. There's a vein of cynicism that runs deep, that says the world is coldly mechanical and that there's no guarantee. Systems are what they do, and what they do is proliferate in ways that are indifferent and frequently hostile to inefficiencies such as kindness and equality. History is a ship steered through a storm by bickering gatherings of whoever lucks into the power to shove onto the bridge. A flash of lightning like this might spook one of the temporary helmsman into loosening their grasp, but it won't turn us from the reefs.

But fuck! Who critiques the handwriting on a suicide note? Who spits on someone that takes a bullet for a friend? Who asks a stranger if they're sure they want to do something so permanent to their body?

I think the best case scenario is that Bushnell's identity as an active duty white soldier in his uniform is so shocking that it pushes a handful of dithering idiots in congress into remembering the idea of decorum and they're the decisive vote in something meaningful. I don't think he's changed the minds of anyone that was already paying attention.

And I think it's entirely fair to assume he knew that, and committed anyway! This wasn't a confused child, or a spur of the moment decision. This was a highly educated adult man with firm beliefs that traveled across the country and made himself as visible and clearly understood as possible before deliberately lighting himself on fire.

I can disagree with his method and whether or not the impact will be worth the price. I can mourn the situation he found himself trapped in, and rage fruitlessly at the ongoing horrors of the genocide that drove him to action. I can even pity him!

But I can do all of that while respecting his conviction. We're told endlessly to valorize idiot kids sent off to die and kill in foreign deserts filled with people with so many fewer choices, but we can't accept that one of them might die for a different belief? We can accept all the ones that come back broken and traumatized to kill themselves quietly out of sight, but we can't let one of them try to say something? We can condemn and fear the ones that slide into conspiracy and turn innocent lives into empty sermons of hate, but we can't watch as one goes out without any other victim?

In the absence of a clear and obvious angle to attack Bushnell’s protest, most likely due to his status as a serviceman that would make outright insulting him or suppressing the news itself scandalous, discussions on Western shores have now taken on the familiar framing of mental illness. In Time Magazine’s write-up of Bushnell’s death, the article finishes with a link to the suicide hotline, and asks readers to contact mental health providers if they are experiencing a “crisis.” Mark Joseph Stern, a writer at Slate, seemingly unasked, also wrote on Twitter/X:

“I strongly oppose valorizing any form of suicide as a noble, principled, or legitimate form of political protest. People suffering mental illness deserve empathy and respect, but it is wildly irresponsible to praise them for using a political justification to take their own life.”

Conviction does not exist to the American. To be willing to die in a selfless act for what they believe in only exists for those outside America's sphere of influence. Many will recall reporting on those who self-immolated in protest in Iran and in Russia for instance where this sort of approach, unwilling to engage with the root of its cause, would not even be entertained, let alone written and published with sincerity. The Arab Spring began with a self-immolation. The self-immolation of Buddhist monks in protest of South Vietnam’s persecution became defining images of the war and its corruption. Within America’s walls however, there is a belief, unspoken and ingrained from birth, that democracy allows for everyone’s voices to be heard and that its representatives are inherently inclined to respond to the people and their widespread wishes.

Desperation at inaction or complicity in terror and atrocity need not apply. Everyone incensed by their government to such an extent must simply have something wrong with them. To be able to go about one’s day knowing that children are screaming from the hunger that is eating their insides and that pregnant women are eating bread made from animal feed, and that the United States is supporting Israel’s creation of this famine, is apparently the real sign of well-adjustment.

Seamus Malekafzali, “The Words Burned Through His Throat: The Sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell,” February 26, 2024.