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.