{"id":256182,"date":"2024-03-04T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=256182"},"modified":"2024-03-01T06:21:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T06:21:56","slug":"changing-the-world-with-fire-and-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/changing-the-world-with-fire-and-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing the World with Fire and Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

28 Feb 2024<\/em> – 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire \u2014 doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match and ignited himself \u2014 in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday, 25 Feb. The last words he shouted were \u201cFree Palestine!\u201d<\/p>\n

No, this is not the first such death. Over the centuries \u2014 and particularly in recent decades, since the Vietnam war \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Not to worry, however! You can peruse mainstream coverage of the suicide and begin to relax as the act fades into just more yada yada. Either the guy was mentally ill or absurdly hungry to generate a major public-relations impact for his cause. Here\u2019s NPR<\/a>, for instance, quoting a university professor \u2014 an expert on protest suicides \u2014 who explained that such acts started happening regularly around the world in the 1960s, when television had claimed media dominance and, thus, \u201cprotesters were able to reach a larger audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is basically the same way the media covers war itself: strategically. Human lives \u2014 human deaths \u2014 morph into video-game abstractions. What really matters is who\u2019s winning.<\/p>\n

All I can do is stand, or kneel, with the spirit of Aarin Bushnell, the 25-year-old man, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, whose death is real, who surrendered his life because he could no longer bear his country\u2019s complicity in Israel\u2019s devastation of Gaza. Livestreaming what he was about to do, he said<\/a> in his cellphone video:<\/p>\n

\u201cI will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it\u2019s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as the flames began to engulf him, he cried \u201cFree Palestine!\u201d until he finally collapsed. Police and others ran to him, sprayed the flames with a fire extinguisher. They rushed him to a hospital, where he died several hours later.<\/p>\n

To minimize this as a PR stunt is itself a manifestation of illness \u2014 not mental illness, perhaps, but spiritual illness, which is the nature of war itself. I say this in my own incomprehension at the motive behind such an action: To open yourself to the pain a bombing victim himself might feel is something more than an \u201cact of protest.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a direct confrontation with the wrong you can no longer bear witnessing or being a part of, and yes, it is using violence \u2014 but not to harm or kill your opponent. Instead, you are attempting to widen the public\u2019s understanding of what you are protesting by killing yourself. It\u2019s the absolute opposite of war. This is consciousness shift. This is an awareness that we are connected to one another and that we must protect that connection, even at our own expense.<\/p>\n

These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and author of The Phenomenon of Ma<\/a>n<\/em>, suddenly seem remarkably relevant: \u201cSomeday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cenergies of love. . .\u201d What does this mean? I can only say this: It\u2019s bigger than the horrific foolishness of organizing human society around the political need for an enemy, or what Walter Wink, in his book The Powers That Be<\/a><\/em>, called \u201cthe myth of redemptive violence\u201d \u2014 the belief that violence saves us.<\/p>\n

Indeed, he wrote: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be in the nature of things. It\u2019s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attention, mankind! That\u2019s the wrong god. And we know this, at the deepest core of our being. As I contemplate Bushnell\u2019s suicide, I also find myself unavoidably thinking about a 13-year-old schoolgirl named Marian Fisher, one of five girls killed by a lost soul of a gunman at an Amish school<\/a> in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 2006. As survivors recounted, when the gunman threatened the children, Marian said to him: \u201cShoot me first<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something here beyond \u201cnormal\u201d thinking, beyond, shall we say, \u201csurvival of the fittest.\u201d What\u2019s at stake is humanity\u2019s collective consciousness, which both Aaron and Marion knelt to and gave their lives for, seeming to know it transcended them.<\/p>\n

Their sacrifice \u2014 and the sacrifices of so many others over the years \u2014 begins to define the size of the changes we must make in our global politics, in our relationship with power, in our relationship with one another.<\/p>\n

By trying to put such a change into words, let me not oversimplify it. I turn again to Teilhard de Chardin and his belief that we will harness the energies of love \u201c. . . and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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