Aaron Bushnell and the price of conscience

On February 25, 2024 at 12:48 p.m., Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty airman, live-streamed his self-immolation in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., yelling “Free Palestine!” until he collapsed. He was 25 years old.

Democracy Now! reported,

An officer who arrived on the scene can be seen brandishing a gun and pointing it at Aaron Bushnell as he burns alive and collapses to the ground. Another officer sprays him with a fire extinguisher. As the first officer continues to point his gun at Aaron, the second officer yells, “I don’t need guns. I need a fire extinguisher.”

I was in my mid-teens when I saw a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, self-immolating in Saigon to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government and, more broadly, the U.S. war on Vietnam. I must admit that, during the years of the U.S. genocide, I saw so many photographs, newsreels, and reports of Vietnamese bodies charred by fire and by napalm, so many mass graves and corpses littering the landscape, that the 1963 photograph got lost among my memories of that racist barbarism.

Although the underlying cause of Thích Quảng Đức’s death was U.S. imperialism, the proximate cause was his decision to end his life in a most public manner as a protest on behalf of others.

So it was with Aaron Bushnell — and others. His life was his to end. He did so to bring attention to U.S. complicity in the genocide in Gaza. His was not a suicide sparked by a mental health crisis. He planned his death carefully. He explained the politics behind his decision. To question his judgment because his form of protest makes us uncomfortable is to make his act the issue, rather than what prompted the act. We could just as easily question the judgment of those who put themselves at risk of death by organizing miners in the coalfields of Appalachia or by registering Black voters in rural Mississippi. These were all acts of courage.

Bushnell’s self-sacrifice did not change U.S. government policy. Nor, for that matter, did the student Gaza encampments, which overlapped Bushnell’s death. Only an organized mass movement that can challenge power can effect such a change. Union organizers went to Appalachia and civil rights organizers went to Mississippi to build such movements.

But the only way to build mass movements is to change people’s minds. Bushnell’s individual act and the students’ collective acts did that.

I didn’t watch Bushnell’s self-sacrifice. The one I saw in my mid-teens was already one too many. It is not in me to kill myself as a form of protest. I don’t hope that others follow Bushnell’s example. I don’t want people to die, for any reason. Bushnell’s self-immolation was courageous, but I have to find my own courage and I can’t measure my courage against his.

Bushnell’s death reminds us that conscience comes with a price — the price of action, whatever form that action takes.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves,” Bushnell wrote, “‘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. Right now.”