The World Is On Fire. Please Don’t Self-Immolate in Solidarity
My take on a recent act of non-violent protest
Is setting yourself on fire a big enough act to catch the attention of the world?
You may or may not have heard of Wynn Bruce. He was a 50-year-old man based out of Boulder, Colorado.
He set himself on fire Friday in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. He died a day later.
A known Buddhist, members of his sangha, or spiritual community have tried to express that this wasn’t an act of desperation.
It was, as a woman who knew him stated, “an act of compassion.”
I don’t have any trouble believing this. I’ve been a yogi for 6 years and have studied the works and acts of Buddhist scholars. It isn’t hard to believe that Bruce had reached a state of mind where his sense of ego had completely dissolved.
If you’re thinking, timeout, what? I totally get it. You can choose to delve deeper into understanding what may have led to Bruce setting himself on fire or not.
That isn’t what I want to talk about.
Self-immolation has a long history of being used as an act of radical, nonviolent protest, often by monks but not always and often in protest of wars such as the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan.
I do want to note that the correlation between self-immolation and Buddhism is most strongly noted in Tibetan Buddhists who are protesting China’s occupation. While self-immolation has a history in ancient Buddhist texts, it has been most widely seen in Tibet.
The thought process is fairly easy to follow: someone setting themselves on fire is ideally hard to ignore.
However, time and again, it is ignored. China still occupies Tibet. The Vietnam War was fought at too high of a cost.
I can’t know or understand why Bruce thought self-immolating as a protest against climate change in front of the Supreme Court would actually catch anyone’s attention.
It’s already fallen behind in trending news topics.
I can imagine that to reach the headspace Bruce was in, he would have had a deep experience of feeling interconnected to all living and nonliving things.
Interbeing is another major tenet of Buddhism that I don’t have the expertise to get into.
Interbeing and interdependency are practices the West is not very good at incorporating into our everyday lives, especially if it doesn’t benefit us.
No wonder this self-immolation was never going to shake things up.
I think there is a way to go about trying to evoke change, however small it may be.
I don’t think self-immolation-especially the self-immolation of one man- is likely to catch anyone’s attention. Personally, I don’t think it ever was. Life is too precious.
Time is running out to fight for the future of this planet, and I’d like to use the years I have left to be here, doing the fighting.
Wherever you are, Wynn Bruce, may you be happy and free ☀️
Song of The Day
I would be remiss not to include a song of the day! Check out one of the Dalai Lama’s greatest hits here ❤
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