#to clarify i think ppl have the right to kill themselves and to self-immolate
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mercifullymad · 9 months ago
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okay i have a serious question. a few nights ago i posted (& then immediately quickly deleted) a rant about how every post i saw reporting on the words of the palestinian children, some as young five years old, who want to die (because of the overall situation in palestine and/or because all of their family members are dead) was being tagged "suicidal ideation tw" or "cw suicidal ideation" by nearly every user tagging it, & this deeply disturbed me for reasons i found difficult to enunciate. the closest i could come to enunciating the logic of this disturbance was that the function of trigger/content warnings is to protect the most vulnerable in our communities from being re-traumatized or reminded of their trauma unnecessarily, when they could otherwise choose to avoid triggering content had they the knowledge that allowed them to do so. and in this case, the most vulnerable in our communities are these children: children experiencing genocide, and children experiencing "suicidal ideation" (a term i think over-psychiatrizes and obscures the root cause of these feelings: GENOCIDE!!). THEY are the most vulnerable in our global community, and they are also the population in most need of attention and care. they cannot consent to the way their words are being distributed, interpreted, and framed (as a "suicidal ideation trigger warning" when they are. five years old.). and i think that ALL of us, yes even those of us who are suicidal, owe them this attention and care. if we are not actively experiencing genocide ourselves and their words leave us feeling triggered, we have the ability to call a warmline, talk with peers, text our therapists, etc etc. they do not.
i deleted this post because it seemed like too controversial a topic, & i am not palestinian and do not want to speak over others. but then aaron bushnell self-immolated and i am once again feeling angry at the double-standard. i have yet to see a post tagged "suicide tw" regarding bushnell's self-immolation, and he was a grown adult who made the choice to kill himself when he had nearly every other option of protest to choose from, especially as a white male army member (burn down/destroy whatever government buildings or weapons he had access to; burn important official papers; organize with other service members to engage in a mass movement of conscientious objection). aaron bushnell killed himself as an adult, freely, as a form of protest, and with many other options at his disposal as a white USA citizen. and yet nearly no one tags his posts "tw suicide" — in fact, i've seen many more posts about why we shouldn't consider self-immolation "suicide." meanwhile, palestinian children, who have no other protest options at their disposal, who are in a carceral situation, who simply SPEAK about wanting to die from the desperation of experiencing genocide and the loneliness of being the last member of their family alive — THEIR words are "suicidal ideation" trigger warning'ed to hell and back? i truly do not understand the logic. to return to my initial question, which i ask with sincerity: what makes these children more triggering than aaron bushnell?
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