Revolutionary Suicide: When the Empath Can Endure No More

Aaron Bushnell and self-immolation as an act of revolt

I was sitting on my bathroom floor when I saw the news of Aaron Bushnell, a 25 year old United States Air Force serviceman who set himself on fire in Washington DC to protest the ongoing genocide.

I’d been vomiting. It’s the anniversary of a traumatic event and my PTSD is as pernicious as ever.

I scrolled through social media, unable to sleep, when I came across the image of a police officer pointing a gun at a man burning, accompanied with the audio of a young man screaming in agony.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, please don’t let this be real.

To my despair, it was real.

It’s the darkest pain of the human conscience that we hear in the agony of Bushnell’s screams.

The gun pointed at him as he turned to ash was representative of the coldness and inhumanity of what we’ve become as a culture.

Aaron Bushnell was close in age to most of my college students.

I leaned over the toilet and vomited more.

I can’t take much more of this horror, I thought.

Will I succumb to suicide too?

I know if I do, I doubt I’ll have the guts to be public and let people aim their weapons at me as I die in the face of their apathy, hatred, and fear.

I’ve already offered thousands of words to this world crying out in agony for the horrors I’ve watched and endured from humanity.

There’ll be nothing left to say.

I visited Israel and Palestine in 2014: it was the most transformative experience of my life.

I learned more there about love, hate, survival, oppression, history, war, colonization, apartheid, genocide, and resistance than I could’ve learned reading 100 books, though I have read hundreds of books on these topics in an attempt to rectify my ignorance.

As someone born into a family of people afflicted with ASPD, I was raised on the rhetoric of racial hatred and death.

My parents celebrated war and the deaths of people of color. My father had a confederate flag in his basement.

My parents said all people of color were evil (except they never used the term “people of color.” They didn’t grant them any humanity or personhood). They said they’d all turn out to be murderers and rapists.

But my father was a rapist. And my parents celebrated murder. They saw no irony in their projections. They only did it to “people who deserved it.”

But the people they attacked were not always of color: I’m white, and I was their scapegoat child. They also attacked anyone who was white who was antiracist or differed in their political ideology.

Their white supremacy wasn’t even consistent: they only believed in their own personal supremacy.

All of this hurt me deeply as a child. I had friends in school who were of color.

Yes, some people of color have NPD or ASPD as well: these are trauma responses that affect all human beings. We are one human race, so mental illnesses affect people of all races.

That shouldn’t be hard to understand, but for some reason, it’s impossible for people to understand.

It’s a reflection of narcissists’ split thinking about race, needing their race to be all good and anything else all bad.

We all pay the price for that delusion.

I sought to heal the generational trauma of racism in my family.

I wanted to take accountability as a white person and use my privilege responsibly.

In taking agency for my own education, I learned that race is a social construct: human evolution is rooted in South Africa, so all of us have black ancestors. The different skin tones were adaptations that happened over thousands of years of migration to other climates as the human species evolved.

Therefore, I concluded that the spiritual challenge in life is to be able to see beyond our differences to understand that we’re actually one and the same.

Even empaths and sociopaths, narcissists and borderlines, and everyone outside and in between.

We are ONE.

The war between good and evil is not fought between yourself and those who you fear because they are different from you in some way: it’s a war in our own hearts.

And narcissists, who are often racist due to their fears and envy of those different from them, lose that war when they project their fear and self hatred outward, refusing to do the inner reflection work and self education necessary to heal.

Narcissists also often struggle with centering their own pain as being more important than anyone else’s. They see pain like they see most other things: a competition.

I had no idea what darkness of pain I’d be facing when I went to Palestine.

In the Holy Land, you enter the belly of the beast.

I first learned about self immolation as protest in studying Tunisia.

Tarek El-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in 2010, an act which became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring against fascist regimes.

I was taken aback watching people’s reaction.

Over and over, citizens on the street praised his sacrifice.

They called him a martyr and a hero; they said he did the courageous act that they wished they could do themselves.

It was a horror for me to conceptualize how such a terrifying and extreme tragedy could be deemed “heroic.” It seemed like another form of cultural madness to me.

UNTIL I FELT THE URGE TO DO IT MYSELF.

While standing in a checkpoint in Palestine — which amounts to hours in line in cattle shoots under the hot sun with the most powerful weapons in the world aimed at you — I watched a young Palestinian man with Downsyndrome get humiliated and manhandled by an IDF soldier. He was crying.

THEN I WANTED TO DIE.

I wanted to take myself out of the line, take a gun from one of the soldiers, and to aim it at my own head in protest.

I did not want to continue living in a world so void of a heart, so willing to mercilessly abuse the most vulnerable people who live amongst us.

I wanted everyone to see and feel my pain as I went.

I wanted to force people to face my despair.

When I returned home from my peace delegation, I’d witnessed so much horror that suicide was on my mind all the time.

I have Borderline Personality Disorder, cPTSD, and high functioning autism: suicidal ideation has been a part of my life since I was a child, and there have been several unsuccessful attempts.

A reason why this happens for those with BPD is our extreme empathy: we FEEL the pain of others in pain emotionally. It’s so extremely painful that it’s life-threatening.

When I see an orphan screaming in rubble after the loss of their parents, I plummet into such bleak darkness that I can’t get out of bed, can’t go to work.

I develop a resentment for those who carry on in their fantasy world, who expect me to be able to work and cater to all their needs as if this horror isn’t happening and my heart isn’t shattered.

I don’t want to resent people: I want to love people. I want us to all have human rights and dignity.

I don’t know why that’s so hard for us to do.

I don’t know why love is so impossible for our species.

But the more I see a lack of love, the more I feel alien and alone.

I know that this world would do to me what it does to others in a heartbeat and without a flinch of remorse, because it’s already done so.

The only thing that’s kept me alive this long is God.

In a world with this much hate and so little love, those with genuine empathy are needed, even if we’re hated and deemed to be crazy.

When I saw Aaron Bushnell’s death, I knew that we’d lost one of our most heroic and empathetic souls.

I grieve that loss.

I wish he was still here with us.

Black Panther activist Huey P. Newton said, “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against those forces, even at the risk of death.”

When Martin Luther King organized his nonviolent resistance campaign, protestors gathered together beforehand.

They beat each other and had to practice NOT HITTING BACK.

They had to be ready for the dogs, the hoses, and even death.

They don’t teach us that part in schools.

The protestors had to train away any resistance to fight back, and all of them knew that the potential cost of their peaceful revolt was DEATH.

Racists today often say, “If only people of color would be nonviolent like they were with MLK.”

What they really mean is this: If only they will just obediently DIE when we attack them in fear and hatred.

(And how hypocritical to preach non-violence when the majority of your taxes goes towards the most violent military in the world).

The same is true for Palestinians. As we watch every hospital in Gaza bombed, every school bombed, white phosphorus raining on children as they play amongst rubble, people consistently say, “They’re Hamas. They support Hamas. They’re human shields for Hamas.”

Every Palestinian is made to bear the sins of those Palestinians who reacted to their oppression with violence.

But the truth is that not all Palestinians agree with Hamas and only a small portion of the population in Gaza is active with them.

Those who are in Hamas are generally just like those who are Zionists: they’re people with narcissism as a result of their generational trauma.

Violence doesn’t actually solve terrorism: it creates more terrorists. It perpetuates the cycle of abuse.

Those who profit off of making war machines know this. It’s what they want: never-ending war, billions of tax dollars in their pockets to make war machines.

Here is where you can see the accusation is confession, as narcissists do through pathological projection. When they accuse children of being Hamas, they admit that they themselves are terrorists. When they accuse of supporting Hamas, they admit that they terrorize to antagonize and create more Hamas.

They’ll only maintain their profits if they can maintain the image of the terrifying other: the scapegoated people who deserve abuse.

An accusation hurled at protestors of genocide is frequently that they are “antisemitic.” Again, this is confession through accusation as narcissistic projection: Palestinians are semites too and they’re willfully erasing that shared heritage. And narcissists hate themselves at their core and project that hate, accusing others of their shames.

The tragic irony is that this exact same sick game was played upon Jewish people in WW2, and everything we see happening today is a direct result of that unhealed wound.

Terrorists are often people who were orphaned or brutalized by war, just as Zionists are a product of the unhealed generational trauma of the Holocaust.

They are each other’s mirror. Their pain is one and the same.

The biggest danger of being oppressed is becoming the oppressor.

The reason this is a danger is because it has a root in our mental health reactions to trauma: Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

We keep pretending that those with sociopathy are actually “normal” and “neurotypical,” which is a fantasy that doesn’t even exist. We also keep pretending we aren’t consistently electing narcissists in our public offices who are corrupted by the power they use as a drug for grandiosity and supply.

This disorder is a public mental health crisis that we haven’t addressed, because we haven’t been able to face reality and truth to do so.

Genocide is a cancer that SPREADS when you don’t treat it.

Unless people are brave enough to address the cancer at its root — radiate it out or cut out the tumor — break the cycle and the generational curses, and say NO MORE.

Say NEVER AGAIN.

And mean it for ALL OF HUMANITY.

But that’s not enough: we also need to tend to our most wounded — our sociopaths and narcissists.

We need to begin the hard work of real healing and reconciliation.

For a revolutionary suicide, the future of healing looks bleak: the cancer is TERMINAL.

I can’t stress this enough: IT IS TERMINAL.

Gaza is the future of us all if we don’t address this.

Soon, it’ll be YOU crying out against your own genocide.

It’ll be your kids living in uninhabitable circumstances, so polluted by bombs that the very air you breath is poison.

You can join the fascists, but they won’t save you. They turn on each other like wolves.

It’ll be the end of our species.

The revolutionary suicide sees that this is coming because we understand the patterns of history, and can’t stay another minute for it.

They self destruct in a cautionary blaze, a light in the darkest pit that seeks to illuminate the gravest reality we’re all refusing to face.

And in taking away their light — their love and their empathy — we’re left pondering the pit we’ve fallen into.

Those who shut their eyes in the dark will say that Bushnell was mad.

Of course he was.

And you should be driven to madness too, to live in a world with such horror. Bushnell asks to to confront yourself and question why you’re NOT driven to such despair. Do you have a heart? A conscience?

Because if you’re not IN DESPAIR, then you’re mad anyway, in a different form.

Why is it so easy for us to see the revolutionary suicide as an act of a madman, but not see the fascist mentality of racial hatred, genocide, and apartheid as utter madness?

Evil acts are always done by those who perceive themselves as ALL GOOD, as perfect, as without flaw, as superior in some way, as arbitrarily chosen by God. History has shown us this very clearly.

This tendency in people is narcissism: it’s what allows evil acts to occur.

Good people are people who see that all people have both good and evil within them. I see this even in sociopaths and narcissists, who I’ve spent my whole life with and loved very sincerely. I see good in them despite their delusions, anger, abuses, confusions, and mental health struggles.

That’s because I see them as human. I don’t strip their humanity for having a mental illness.

None of us are perfect, and no one is all good or all bad.

It’s our own inability to look at and integrate our own shadows or accountability in the face of evil that allows evil to perpetuate.

The war between good and evil is a spiritual, internal war. If you don’t wrestle with it internally and you project it externally, then you’re losing that war.

Bushnell surrendered, but he didn’t lose the spiritual war as he did so.

Aaron Bushnell, like my father, and like nearly all people who sign up for the military, likely did so with the best intentions of being heroic.

In doing so, he wanted to find a place to belong, a group that felt like a strong, moral, brave family.

Reports revealed that Biden was sending US Air Force jets to aid in the bombing of Gaza. Bushnell was in the Air Force.

His protest was not only political, it was personal.

He was asked by his government to carry out their murder machine, because we are a trauma bonded culture that routinely elects sociopaths (in both parties).

Bushnell was raised in the cult atmosphere of a religious compound, and militaries often function like cults: everyone dresses alike and you don’t question the Great Leader. You don’t learn true history and are indoctrinated to fear and simple binaries of good and evil. You do as you’re told at the risk of severe punishment or social expulsion and isolation. You abuse the narcissist’s scapegoats without conscience or question. You erase your own humanity for the benefits that a cult brings you. You see those who are different as those to fear, as the epitome of evil.

To reject any cult mentality is to find yourself isolated, alone, and made into a scapegoat yourself.

But Bushnell had done the work: he knew the history enough to see the lies and hypocrisies behind the masks of heroism. He followed his conscience.

He knew doing so would cause him to lose everything. In his final words, he said he had “nothing left to lose.”

He took it upon himself to extinguish his own light in a blaze of fire.

It’s OUR loss that we lost someone like Aaron Bushnell in our armed services.

He’s the kind of person you’d want to fight for you.

I’m sorry that I only got to know his soul through an act as desperate as this one.

May we someday learn the lessons from such a tragic, preventable loss.

May we find strength in his act to blaze our own lights without turning ourselves to ash.

The lesson in Bushnell’s suicide is that we must step up to the challenge God has set up for us in this life: we must see our common humanity despite our differences.

We must learn how to love one another radically and unconditionally.

We must learn how to heal.

It’s not easy work.

The wounds we create today will be felt for generations, just as we still feel the effects of slavery and native genocide and the Holocaust.

It may seem that narcissists can’t do this work, as they perpetuate the cycle of abuse, but they CAN, and sometimes they do, because they have cognitive empathy. It takes mental toughness, education, and a supportive environment, but I’ve seen them do it.

(Eminem, a person with NPD as a trauma response who profited off of black culture but now advocates in solidarity with antiracism).

As a professor, I’ve watched narcissist students wrestle with their own racism or sexism or homophobia and heal it within themselves when they were in nonjudgmental spaces and guided with love.

I’ve also known people with NPD who were of color who were able to reflect on their own cultural scapegoating experiences of racism and translate that into solidarity for other races and religions.

It’s about deprogramming brainwash and eradicating fear and anger.

It’s about healing and courage.

No one is ALL BAD or beyond capable of healing, but healing is very challenging for those with NPD or ASPD, and denial and fantasy is preferable to reality for many of them.

They still don’t feel empathy and power is dangerous for them, as it is for all people, but they ARE able to heal these cultural evils and fears we put in our hearts, and it benefits all of us when we focus on communal healing.

It takes work and patience, but it’s possible.

Where there’s still love in humanity, there’s God; where there’s God, there’s hope.

No fascist regime in history has ever won. All empires crumble.

Like a narcissist, the narcissism in a culture will always be unmasked: it will collapse on itself and reveal its fraudulence.

It won’t be a pretty day when it does, but we’ll have no one to blame but our own willful ignorance and lack of action.

Will we be strong enough to resurrect and build something new?

The choice is yours. It’s a battle in your own heart.

I know what I’ve chosen.

I don’t care who hates me for it — who censors me, shadowbans me, gaslights me, calls me hateful names, or wishes me dead: until my dying day, even if I die at my own hands unable to endure this hellish dystopia any longer, I will not choose racism or hate or genocide.

I will choose love.

Only love is sane.

Only love is power.

Only love is divine.

Only love is God.

Thank you, Aaron Bushnell. I understand why you had to do what you did. I’m sorry we lost you when your soul is what we need most.

I’ll try to remember your beautiful, loving smile, though I’m haunted by the agonizing screams as you left this dark world and walked into the light.

May you rest in peace, in a loving place, in the kind of place you’ve always dreamed of, the kind of place you’d hoped you were fighting for.

Palestinians are not people to forget those who stood up for them when the world shut its eyes. You may not be draped in military medals, but you are forever stamped on the hearts of so many, and your name is being whispered in prayers all over the world.

“Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.” -Toni Morrison

For individual coaching or group healing sessions, visit https://am-champion.com

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A.M. Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.