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Man Sets Himself On Fire Near Trump Trial Court
I don’t know if I can convey how much this sickens me, or how much it makes me want to puke (headline is here).
Thirty-five years ago, one of my co-workers did just this in a Philadelphia park. He was a dear man and a competent employee, someone who’d ended up reporting to me after an acquisition by my own hospital of another hospital on the other side of the state. Someone whose story I knew parts of, but whose struggles I didn’t fully comprehend.
My (much despised, but that’s a different story) boss called me out of the blue one morning and said, “Did you hear what happened to P- L- yesterday?”
“No,” I responded.
He’d died, in public agony in that park, after setting himself on fire with a can of gasoline and a box of matches.
He was a Vietnam veteran. Scarred for life, not only by his experiences on the other side of the world, but also by those experiences he’d lived through upon his return.
He’d married, had a wife and family (for the rest of my life I’ll appreciate his wife’s recipe for date-nut bread/cream cheese sandwiches, which have been a staple of my lunch life for the past almost 40 years).
But he couldn’t recover from his ordeal.
That we are living in an era where people promote “The Legacy of Self-Immolation” as a virtue and something to be admired and emulated, is deeply disturbing to me.
My dear friend Patrick had a reason for what he did. Not the pretense of “climate change.” Not political posturing, or the invention of triggering offense, or invented stress.
What he had in his life was real, actual, unimaginable torment which he couldn’t survive by himself.
That twenty-first century pretenders would take advantage of such a thing is beyond disgusting. And that there are those who’ll succumb to their siren-song and praise them is so terribly sad I don’t quite know what to do.
Other than to call them out for the imposters and the fools that they are.
Published in General
Notthebee has details about the guy. They wrote:
He’s not.
I think this kind of act is demonic . Literally ! That a human being that no longer wanted to live would choose this way is beyond imagination . Their a dark powers at work here .
I read those articles You linked to.
And good gawd.
Those who praise people for this awful, sick act are more sick that the victim. As Kevin says, above, there is something demonic at work here.
Lots of mental illness these days. Much of it in the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas protests.
From what I have read, this deeply lost soul was a real conspiracy loon. The only reason it gets connected in the headlines to the Trump trial appears to be that he was rational enough to know that, if he were to immolate himself nearby, there were already media people and crowds of protestors/onlookers, guaranteeing lots of coverage of his action. Sad. I feel bad for his family.
At least he didn’t ask the government to get the medical profession involved in “assisting” him.
I looked over some of this guys thoughts and they did resonate a bit
* The Dems and Repubs are working together to further global means. (About right)
* The Right is weak and restoration can only come from the Left. (Half right)
I lost a good friend to this. A mental health crisis sent her home a bit early sophomore year. A few weeks later she set herself afire in her parents garage. We were going to be roommates the next year. A smart, beautiful girl. She is buried at a country church outside Cincinnati. Her father was buried next to her about 10 years later. It is not supposed to happen that way.
The fear, the pain. The shame. It was in the newspaper. People talked. The memorial service at school. The life that could have been. Beautiful Jenny had her whole life ahead of her. I am still overwhelmed by it 42 years later.
I don’t care if he flung pamphlets, if he had a whackadoodle blog. Immolation is a gruesome act that wastes a life and cases immense pain. If Azzarello survives, well, I have compassion for him. His pain is only beginning.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m so sorry. You are 100% right.
Absolutely spot on. This is terrifying. It shows the power of propaganda. The result of soaking yourself in lies is a desire to soak yourself in gasoline.
According to NBC News I saw this morning,
So, nothing to see here. And no claim he was a member of the far right so, generally that leaves one other alternative.