The brave, cruel death of Aaron Bushnell

 

I am haunted tonight by the story of Airman Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire yesterday in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., and died screaming "Free Palestine."

Quite apart from the fact that self-immolation is one of the oldest, most violent, and ultimately most self-sacrificing forms of political protest, the fact that his death should be a source of mockery and amusement in the gutters of social media should give everyone pause, no matter where they fall on what has been sterilely described as "the Israel-Gaza conflict."

In the absence of evidence that Mr. Bushnell had mental health issues (and no such evidence has been forthcoming) the only available conclusion is that he made himself the ultimate statement of the gravity of his beliefs. Where I land, that makes him a pure martyr, whatever anyone believes about his cause.

Furthermore, unlike other self-styled "martyrs," he took his own life without taking anyone else's. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture where so many so-called "believers in democracy" can't be bothered to even vote, the depth of commitment to an ideal that a sacrifice like his represents is most likely incomprehensible to most.

But the people circulating picture of his burning body on Twitter—in many cases, self-identified "pro-God" American Christians—make me wonder, yet again, if the real political divide in our society is between left and right, or if it's actually between the humane and the utterly inhumane—human beings so divorced from their own humanity, and the humanity of their fellow man, that they see humour, and find a source of sadistic disdain, in the tragic, horrifying heroism of a man burning himself alive to protest what he saw as an atrocity inflicted upon people he never even knew.

Someone else is cradling a dead child

My only goal today is to turn down ugly voices—whether they're political commentators on television, or social media chatterboxes blithely dismissing unspeakable agony being endured on the other side of the world. Or casually discussing it like it as a video game, or a reality show. Or cheering it on as though it were a football game for which they, as fans, paint their faces in team colours and call for the "death" of the players on the opposite team, all the while knowing that they're doing it in safety and comfort, from a barcalounger in front of their television, or in a chair in front of a laptop, utterly immune from concomitant injury.

The fact that millions of them self-identify as "people of faith," whatever that faith, merely makes their casualness all the more ghastly. They're inured from the cruelty and the inhumanity of their own words, partly because they're written or spoken in a self-validating echo chamber; but mostly because their words ultimately have no effect on the people's lives being blown apart, literally and metaphorically.

All of that is happening to someone else, somewhere a long, long, way away. Someone else is cradling a dead child. Someone else is trying to shield their family from a hailstorm of rockets and bombs. As Yeats wrote, "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.