AVELLINO: Do not valorize suicide
Content warning: suicide
Mason Escamilla remembered Aaron Bushnell as a “normal, quiet, friendly, quirky guy.” Escamilla attended a vigil held on Friday for Bushnell, the 25-year-old serviceman who committed suicide via self-immolation on February 25 in order to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
At the vigil, Escamilla said Bushnell liked root beer, had a cat named Sugar and volunteered with organizations that helped the homeless. It is facts like these in which I can see glimpses of myself and my loved ones’ lives reflected in Bushnell’s.
Levi Pierpont, a conscientious objector and friend of Bushnell, recalled his last moments with him in The Guardian, “I found my last text conversation with him. He had sent me a YouTube video he thought was funny, and we had chatted back and forth about it.” Every week, I have dozens of similar interactions with my friends.
In the same article that quotes Escamilla, Kayla Epstein and Angelica Casas report that Bushnell “belonged to a competitive performance group called Spirit Winter Percussion.” From a quick glance at their website, Spirit Winter Percussion looks a lot like the marching band my friends and I performed for in high school.
Though I do not need a personal connection to feel empathy for the dead, all these facts remind me of the loved ones in my life. Bushnell’s name could just as easily have been Michael or Alex or Marcelo or Lizzie or Sierra.
I probably would have liked Bushnell, who had Air Force knowledge like my brother does, and the fact that he could have schooled me in politics from the Left like my friend Alessandro does. It gives me a deeper sense of sadness that he is gone.
It also gives me a deep sense of weirdness, seeing how many people are reacting to his suicide.
Presidential candidate Cornel West posted on the social media platform X that Bushnell demonstrated "courage" by lighting himself on fire. The activist Aya Hijazi called him a “hero and a martyr.” Jewish Voice for Peace, a prominent pro-Palestine organization, celebrated Bushnell’s suicide as his “final act of solidarity.”
During the past few days, much of social media has been filled with thousands of posts similarly portraying Bushnell’s suicide (some popular posts even reject that term outright) as brave, heroic and just.
I am sympathetic to the helplessness that Bushnell felt in the lead-up to his suicide. In a world of insanity such as ours, cremating yourself can seem like the only sane act in the world. But it is not. It is not good, it is not inevitable, it is not brave, and it should not be something that is celebrated.
As much buzz as it is getting now, Bushnell’s suicide is likely not going to cause a lot of change. I do not think our attention to the Israel-Hamas war will drastically change in the following months. We were paying attention to the conflict before his suicide, and we will be paying attention afterward. The very sad reality is that people will probably forget about February’s extreme act of self-immolation like we forgot about December’s.
That is because self-immolation as a tactic is hit-or-miss in terms of causing change. In his paper “Dying Without Killing,” Michael Biggs, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford, notes that “most acts of self-immolation fail to generate any collective response.”
The ones that do generate transformation often happen in circumstances very different from Bushnell’s. Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation helped initiate the Arab Spring, prompted rebellion from a country that was already at the breaking point with its authoritarian government.
But the U.S. is unlikely to be mobilized by Bushnell’s death over Israel’s war with Hamas because Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas. Extreme action will not be the catalyst for change like it was in Tunisia or Vietnam.
Bushnell’s suicide was not necessary, either. Like I said, I am sympathetic to the feelings that preceded Bushnell’s suicide, but we should be celebrating and promoting the kinds of protest we actually want people to partake in. Nobody needs to kill themselves.
My friends who marched through New York City demanding the city pass a ceasefire resolution made serious efforts and then got to march home. Bushnell did not.
The Brown University students who engaged in an eight-day hunger strike and earned national press coverage in early February are still going to see their families come spring break. Bushnell is not.
I am not hopeful that Bushnell’s suicide is going to end U.S. support for Israel’s campaign of terror. But I am afraid of what his self-cremation could cause.
I do not want to spend time speculating on Bushnell’s mental health, as many others have. I have my thoughts, but I do not think them relevant.
What is relevant is the mental health of the people who saw Bushnell’s suicide, and the inspiration they could derive from his death. Highly-publicized suicides have an unfortunate tendency to cause an increase in suicide among those already suffering from suicidal thoughts.
In the month after Robin Williams’s suicide, for example, there was a nearly 10 percent increase in suicides in the U.S., and at the time, nobody was calling Williams’ suicide “brave” or “heroic.” We did not have any political background that tainted our views of what suicide was, is, and always will be: sad. Just really, really sad.
When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was asked last Wednesday about Bushnell’s death, he said, “It's obviously a terrible tragedy, but I think it speaks to the depths of despair that so many people are feeling now about the horrific humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza ... ”
Sanders is consistently the sanest voice among progressives on the Israel-Hamas war. This is no different, and the broader Left would be wise to copy Sanders’ rhetoric: Aaron Bushnell’s suicide speaks to issues greater than any one person.
And it was tragic. Not heroic. Not brave. Tragic. And hopefully after we repeat that to ourselves three times in the mirror, we will start to mean it too.
Noble Avellino is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and minoring in political science. Avellino’s column, “Noble’s Advocate” runs on alternate Mondays.
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