Aaron Bushnell, an active duty U.S. airman, died on February 25, 2024 after self-immolating outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the Gaza genocide. 

(Photo: Talia Jane/X)

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it.”

BRETT WILKINS

Feb 26, 2024 (CommonDreams.org)

“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m 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’s not extreme at all.”

That’s how the 25-year-old from San Antonio introduced himself—and bade farewell—to the world in a livestream video of his Sunday afternoon walk to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Arriving outside the front gate, Bushnell set down his phone, took eight paces, turned to face the camera, doused himself in an unknown accelerant, donned his service cap, and set himself alight. He repeatedly screamed “Free Palestine” as he burned.

Uniformed Secret Service officers arrived on the scene even before Bushnell was able to ignite the fire. They repeatedly ordered him to “get on the ground.”

“Get on the ground, you fucker,” someone—presumably an officer—can be heard saying in the video as Bushnell screams and writhes in agony. He managed one final, garbled, yet unmistakable “free Palestine” as his body was engulfed in flames.

Note: The following video contains blurred graphic images that some readers may find disturbing.

The last walk of Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the US Air Force who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in protest against US involvement in Israel's genocide in Gaza.https://t.co/FwAAH0GJ8B

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) February 26, 2024

Nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the video, an officer in a white shirt rushes in with an extinguisher while an officer points his pistol at Bushnell’s burning body.

“I don’t need guns,” implored the man in the white shirt, “I need fire extinguishers.”

NPRreported Bushnell was rushed to a hospital in critical condition. He died Sunday evening.

Bushnell left a final message on social media early Sunday morning.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?'” he wrote in his first Facebook post in nearly six years. “The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Some observers criticized U.S. corporate media outlets for publishing articles with headlines omitting the words “Gaza,” “Palestine,” or “genocide.”

Why did he do it?

Four major news outlets have almost the exact same headline for the self-immolation of 25-year old Aaron Bushnell. Not one of them mentions the words “Gaza” or “genocide,” the reason for Aaron’s protest, or the word “Palestine,” his last words spoken. pic.twitter.com/MdRCFsptzD

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 26, 2024

How would American media cover a Russian soldier self-immolating in Moscow to protest Putin?

It would probably mention a reason for the tragic act of defiance in the headline. https://t.co/WYFKK7iXtk

— Waleed Shahid ? (@_waleedshahid) February 26, 2024

Others took aim at reports attributing Bushnell’s act to mental health issues.

“They will try to spin-doctor it as mental health issues, but he was rational and clear about his political reasoning, which resonates with [the] majority of the world,” Syracuse University professor Farhana Sultana said on social media. “May his sacrifice not be in vain. Indeed. it was legitimate moral outrage and courage against the holocaust and barbarity in Palestine with U.S. full participation. May his sacrifice not be in vain, may his last words on this earth ring true. #FreePalestine.”

CounterPunch editor Joshua Frank wrote: “Please, stop saying Aaron Bushnell was mentally ill. The real mental illness is witnessing a genocide taking place and not doing a thing to stop it.”

Notice after Aaron Bushnell burns himself alive to protest Israel, how everyone cheerleading. Israel’s carpet bombings of Gaza have, overnight, become mental health experts.

They learned it from the NRA after mass shootings of children. That’s who they’ve become. And worse.

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) February 26, 2024

More than 100,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed or wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets since the October 7 attacks on Israel. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, and at least hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on the brink of starvation.

The U.S. government backs Israel with nearly $4 billion in annual military aid and diplomatic support including three vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions. The Biden administration is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance for Israel, and has twice sidestepped Congress to fast-track emergency military aid.

Last month, The Interceptreported that documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request suggested that the Biden administration deployed a U.S. Air Force team to Israel to assist the Israel Defense Forces with targeting intelligence.

Bushnell’s death is the second reported U.S. self-immolation since the start of the Gaza genocide. On December 1, a woman—whose identity and outcome remain unknown—carrying a Palestinian flag was hospitalized in critical condition after setting herself alight outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

Police called it an “act of extreme political protest.” Israeli Consul-General Anat Sultan-Dadon called it an act of “hate and incitement toward Israel.”

Aaron Bushnell is the second person to self immolate over the Gaza genocide. The first was a woman whose name we do not know because her story was buried. Our monstrous rulers are forcing people to engage in the most extreme, desperate act of political protest just to be heard

— Abby Martin (@AbbyMartin) February 26, 2024

People have set themselves on fire as an act of political protest for many centuries. Following the examples of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns who self-immolated in 1963 to protest persecution by the U.S.-backed Ngô Đình Diệm dictatorship, at least half a dozen Americans burned themselves to death to protest the Vietnam War. Americans also self-immolated over the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, the climate emergency, alleged corruption at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and other reasons.

In December 2010, the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was a major catalyst for the Arab Spring uprising that swept across North Africa and the Middle East.

The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author Thích Nhất Hạnh explained in a letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that the monks and nuns who self-immolated were not committing suicide. Rather, their self-sacrifices were aimed “at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured.”

“It is done,” he explained, “to wake us up.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

BRETT WILKINS

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

By Heather Williams, H.W., M. (with permission)

January 29, 2024 (theprosperos.org)

Are you aware that you are energy?

ENERGY = a dynamic quality; force of expression; a vigorous exertion of power

QUESTION: Are you aware that you are ENERGY?

STORY: I was 23 years old when I lived in a very special community in Mt Shasta, CA.  Liz Andrews was a very good mentor and teacher devoted to helping young people like myself who were interested in knowing our higher capacities. Liz taught classes in the living room on week-ends and during the week we all had jobs. Here is a sentence in my notes from one of Liz’s classes: “We all believe we are physical forms in a material world – BUT – the truth is that our True Nature is ENERGY”. So when our body experiences pain, tightness, injury or difficulty of some kind – we can take charge and Translate the appearance back to the True ENERGY that is here now. I have done this many times over the years and now at 77 my bodily health is flowing with good energy. Yes my 77 year old body is different from my 23 year old body – but the energy continues to flow. It is good for us all to connect with the ENERGY part of us.

QUOTES

“There is enough energy in Hydrogen in the water of your body to run every electrical appliance in the US for 13 weeks. How can you call yourself a physical being? Pathagorus’s theorem of the universe being light and waves was right!” ~ Liz’s Translation class 1971

“The energy of mind is the essence of life.” ~ Aristotle

“Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

EXERCISE

STOP.

Sit quietly. Assume an erect posture.

Sense the breath.

Feel the Energy of life flowing through you now. Feel it in your arms, legs, shoulders, hands.

Listen to this Energy.

Get your pen and paper and write words or draw lines expressing the Energy of the Universe flowing through your body offering guidance. Move forward into your day knowing you are the Energy of the Universe.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told students from the hard-earned platform of his middle age, not long after Virginia Woolf contemplated the courage to be yourself.

It is true, of course, that the self is a place of illusion — but it is also the only place where our physical reality and social reality cohere to pull the universe into focus, into meaning. It is the crucible of our qualia. It is the tightrope between the mind and the world, woven of consciousness.

On the nature of the self, then, depends our experience of the world.

The challenge arises from the fact that, upon inspection, there is no single and static self but a multitude of selves constellating at any given moment into a transient totality, only to reconfigure again in the next situation, the next set of expectations, the next undulation of biochemistry. This troubles us, for without the sense of a solid self, it is impossible to maintain a self-image. There is but a single salve for this disorientation — to uncover, often at a staggering cost to the ego, the constant beneath this flickering constellation, a constant some may call soul.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) takes up the question of discovering the soul beneath the self in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library).

Hermann Hesse

He writes:

Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men* habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Accepting the fact of the bundle is not easy, for it requires seeking the deeper unifying principle, the mysterious superstring binding the bundle. (After all, daily you confront the question of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change — a question habitually answered with precisely this illusion of personality.)

With compassion for this universal human vulnerability to delusion, Hesse observes:

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Considering this ego-self a kind of “optical illusion,” Hesse insists that, with enough courage to break the illusion and enough curiosity about these “separate beings” within, one can discern across them the “various facets and aspects of a higher unity” and begin to see this unity clearly. He writes:

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

A generation before Hesse, Whitman, after boldly declaring that he contains multitudes, recognized across them “a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.”

We call this consciousness, this higher unity of personhood, soul.

I see my soul reflected in Nature — one of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Knowing that even the soul is two-fold, Hesse offers his prescription for resisting the easy path of illusion and annealing the soul from the self. Half a century before Bertrand Russell insisted that the key to a fulfilling life is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Hesse writes:

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

It is only by nurturing and expanding the soul that the self, fluid and fractal, can be held with tenderness. And without tenderness for the self, Hesse reminds us a century before the self-help industry commodified the concept, there can be no tenderness for the world and no peace within:

Love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself… Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

Couple with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.” 

–N. SCOTT MOMADAY

Navarre Scotte Momaday (1934 – January 24, 2024) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. Wikipedia

• By Barry Raphael in art (lumonics.net)

French neuroscientist, musician, and author Pierre Lemarquis’s book, Art That Heals,  writes about “science-backed evidence that seeing or making art can play a crucial role in healing our bodies and minds. [The book] weaves together art history, philosophy, and psychology while citing astounding current findings from his field of neuroscience about the healing power of art.”

“Research on the subject has been accumulating for some years. A 2019 World Health Organization report, based on evidence from over 3000 studies, ‘identified a major role for the arts’ [in the] prevention of illnesses. And in 2018, doctors in Montreal, Canada, made headlines when they started prescribing patients who suffer from certain diseases with museum visits to visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.”

Lemarquis is also “president of a new French association called An Invitation to Beauty, which offers ‘cultural prescriptions’ to patients, including artwork viewings. The UNESCO-supported organization has created an art collection of original works to loan to patients for their rooms at France’s Lyon Sud Hospital, and this program is set to expand.”

Neurological studies show that “art of all kinds acts on our brains in a multi-faceted, dynamic way. Neural networks are formed to achieve heightened, complex states of connectivity. In other words, art can ‘sculpt’ and even ‘caress’ our brains. When observing art, we can get the feeling that we are participating in art’s creation, or putting ourselves in the artist’s shoes.”

“The art-activated areas of our brains that light up when both making or contemplating art, release hormones and neurotransmitters when stimulated, which are beneficial to our health and make us feel good. These include dopamine (lacking among Parkinson’s patients), serotonin (found in antidepressants) as well as endorphins and oxytocin, which both can support pain management and reduction. Adrenaline and cortisone can be activated so as to have an invigorating effect on the body, or on the contrary, they can be blocked for a relaxing effect, depending on the artwork. All of these hormones can help treat mental illness, memory loss, or illnesses associated with stress, among other health concerns.”

“Our brains capture a lot more information than we are conscious of,” Lemarquis says. When perceiving an artwork in-person, for instance, the brain is “lit up, by something akin to beams from a lamp.”

“You don’t treat an illness, you treat a person,” says Lemarquis. “You need medicine that’s purely scientific to address the illness, and medicine that’s a little artistic, to address the person, their humanity. The two are complementary. People need to dream. They need imagination.”

(Contributed by John Atwater, H.W.)

Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us

Stephen W. Porges, Seth Porges

The creator of the Polyvagal Theory explains the principles in simple terms that are accessible to all. Since Stephen Porges first proposed the Polyvagal Theory in 1994, its basic idea―that the level of safety we feel impacts our health and happiness―has radically shifted how researchers and clinicians approach trauma interventions and therapeutic interactions. Yet despite its wide acceptance, most of the writing on the topic has been obscured behind clinical texts and scientific jargon. Our Polyvagal World definitively presents how Polyvagal Theory can be understandable to all and demonstrates how its practical principles are applicable to anyone looking to live their safest, best, healthiest, and happiest life. What emerges is a worldview filled with optimism and hope, and an understanding as to why our bodies sometimes act in ways our brains wish they didn’t. Filled with actionable advice and real-world examples, this book will change the way you think about your brain, body, and ability to stay calm in a world that feels increasingly overwhelming and stressful. 3 black-and-white figures; 1 color figure (tip-in page)

(Goodreads.com)

(Contributed by John Atwater, H.W.)