What are you memorializing this Memorial Day?
Today here in the US, it's Memorial Day.
It's one of our biggest National holidays, meant to commemorate all of the US servicemen and women who have lost their lives in service to this country.
Although for many people, it's meaning has been reduced to a long weekend and shopping sales everywhere.
But I want to talk about one US serviceman in particular, a brave, young 25 year old man who gave his life in service to his country. Not a country that deserved him however, a country that betrayed him.
Aaron Bushnell.
Aaron was a cyber-defense operations specialist with the Air Force 531st Intelligence Support Squadron.
Reportedly he had top security clearance, and several interviews with friends stated that he was very distressed by the information he had access to, and what he was seeing happen in Gaza. He mentioned to one friend that US troops were over there participating in the killings, though officially the government denied that.
On February 25, 2024 he walked up in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, set his phone on a tripod, started a live stream to record, and read a few words that he had written down.
I watched the video the next day, and while I could not bear to watch the whole thing, I did listen to it.
He said, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am 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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine."
Then taking out a small bottle, he poured fuel over his head and body, and lit himself on fire.
Though he must have been in extreme agony, he did not scream, he only said over and over, "Free Palestine". His final words.
He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died several hours later.
Hours before his extreme act of protest, he posted on social media, "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. Right now."
Now I'm sure there are those who want to make the argument that we shouldn't be glorifying those who take their own lives, and that certainly he must have had a mental illness.
But that is not a line of conversation that I have even the slightest bit of patience to entertain.
People who think that way are tone deaf, reductionist, and completely missing the point.
I saw several videos from a young lady who was Aaron's neighbor. She had only positive things to say about him, and while she admitted they weren't very close, she remarked upon his kindness, his gentleness, his compassion and attentiveness towards others. I have seen other such interviews of people who knew him.
And while I don't claim to have read every piece of information written about him, and certainly no one has access to the Consciousness and inner workings of another human, I have seen zero evidence that he had any kind of so-called clinical mental illness.
However here is a perspective that is far more important, and let me ask you this- who has the greater mental illness; someone who had the courage to stand up, to speak out, to choose the most painful, desperate, and extreme form of protest against the immoral and illegal genocide of an entire country of people, or, the politicians, military leaders, Arms contractors, and complicit media agents who aid and abet in all of that?
To me it's an absurd argument to even have to make; even a 5 year old could decipher that those who argue in favor of the absolute madness that is happening are the ones who are quite literally insane.
When sane, legal, and reasonable channels of communication and forms of protest fall on deaf ears and make zero change, how does one make a difference?
I remember so clearly when I was a teenager, reading about and seeing the photographs of a Buddhist monk who self-immolated in 1963, as an extreme form of protest, not just against the Vietnam War, but also against the discrimination and persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngo Dinh Diem.
In the following months, five more monks followed suit and did the same.
I was utterly horrified, incredibly traumatized, sick to my stomach. And terribly, terribly upset.
I couldn't understand why anyone would do such a horrific thing, and at the time, I felt such anger towards him, thinking him to be a coward or some sort of radical religious zealot or something of that nature.
I had no ability to understand the situation, or know how to deal with the intense emotions and reactions that came up in my young body.
And that stayed with me for so many years. It wasn't until I read what one of my most beloved teachers, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh had to say about those events, that I had any context for those radical actions. Both in videos where I heard him speaking about it, and in these letters he wrote to his friend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, he shares a powerful perspective and a deeper understanding.
He wrote to Dr. King - “I believe with all my heart that the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of the oppressors but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man.”
Aaron has not been the only one to feel that way; at least two other people that I'm aware of have self-immolated since the events of October 7th, 2023.
And not only has the United States government not listened at all, they have in fact increased their support for the genocide against the Palestinians.
Sending billions more in financial aid and weapons, including the bombs that dropped yesterday on a refugee encampment in Rafah.
Resulting in a horrific firestorm where dozens of people were burned alive and children killed, including the child in a video which I saw last night, of a man holding up his decapitated baby.
An ACTUAL decapitated baby, unlike the now long debunked horrific lie of the beheaded babies, which was allowed to fuel the reasons for this absolutely absurd and insane atrocity.
I used to believe in my country, in what I thought the United States was founded on. In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And I used to believe in the United States military, thinking we were so fortunate to have the best military in the world, the best and the brightest, the bravest forces to protect us from all threats, foreign and domestic.
Certainly I will acknowledge that there are many brave and honorable men and women in our Armed Forces, and should we ever need them in a genuine and authentic way, we will be very blessed to have them.
And just as surely, the facts of history show us there have been many brave men and women, who during times of War have participated in fighting actual threats to freedom and democracy, and engaged in heroic acts to uphold those values and sacrifice for those who were threatened, and to save each other's lives.
But in the last 8 months I have learned how disgraceful our government truly is and has been for so very long.
All the lies that they have told us.
All the ways they have covertly and directly added to instability in countries around the world as an excuse to send in the military.
Not to protect the US citizens, but to aid themselves in maintaining and expanding the greed and manipulation of the colonial interests.
How hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were mercilessly killed in a completely and utterly unnecessary war that was entirely built on lies.
Not to mention Vietnam, Laos, Korea; the list goes on and on.
And I believe that is what Aaron was protesting. Refusing to be a part of that anymore.
When this month students around the country so bravely stood up to all this corruption and started protesting outside their University campuses, as is their constitutional right, an astonishing amount of our government leaders including the president himself, voiced nothing but contempt and the promise to shut them down by any means necessary. Which they backed up by sending in the police who were allowed to use unnecessary and unlawful force, who also stood by doing nothing while Zionist students were allowed to violently attack peaceful protesters.
I want to believe in our country again.
I want to be proud to call myself American. And to that end, I believe we can continue to hold the vision for a thriving country, with just and honorable leaders, who uphold the actual values that this country was at least in part founded on.
No country is perfect, and no Colonial regime has ever had the right to be such as it was.
But those of us who understand a higher Realm, must hold loyalty to that unseen reality, and claim a world where peace, justice, and morality win out.
Until then, we must speak out.
We must stand up.
We must live as the ideals we hope to one day see as the new normal.
Until then, be mindful of what you are memorializing.
And may we never forget the sacrifice of those like Aaron Bushnell. May he rest in peace.
May this country and the entire world know peace.
And as always, Free Palestine.