My anger at Aaron Bushnell’s wicked gesture, and the effect it could have on others, was tempered by great and involuntary feelings of pity.
I’ve been watching as people react to the self-immolation suicide protest of U.S. airman Aaron Bushnell. What has been interesting is seeing people who are normally committed to an unfettered “right to die” struggle with the fact that acts like Bushnell’s clearly present the threat of social contagion, potentially inspiring the depressed to kill themselves rather than seek help and solace.
We have undergone many decades of dismantling the moral taboos against suicide. It was once considered one of the most serious mortal sins, and suicides were very often denied Christian funereal rites or resting places in Christian cemeteries.
In recent decades, the Church has tended to follow the culture and has accepted suicide as a potential outcome of poor mental health. Even for the churchly, the guilt of suicide has been relieved by theories of the diminished mental and moral competence of those acting under the distress of mental illness.
The rest of the culture has leapt ahead to affirm the right to destroy one’s life as a non-negotiable sign of one’s freedom, even conflating suicide itself with dignity, implying that the former virtue of long-suffering is fundamentally undignified, and inhuman.
Even those of us attached to the old values are affected by the great tidal shift of culture. My anger at Bushnell’s wicked gesture, and the effect it could have on others, was tempered by great and involuntary feelings of pity.
Instead of plain undiluted fury at the people and culture that taught him to instrumentalize his death in this way, I immediately suspected there must have been a great authentic suffering at the heart of his act. Perhaps there was. Perhaps it is just harder to cope in this vale of tears when no one has taught you the words of Jeremiah: “I know, Lord, that our lives are not our own. We are not able to plan our own course.”