The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible.
I’m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire — doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match and ignited himself — in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday, Feb. 24. The last words he shouted were “Free Palestine!”
No, this is not the first such death. Over the centuries — and particularly in recent decades, since the Vietnam war — a number of people, spiritually distraught over war or other social conditions, have killed themselves in protest by self-immolation . . . that is, in the most painful way imaginable. You might say they entered hell of their own accord. Why? The question tears at the soul.
