Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force airman, on Sunday afternoon of February 25, 2024, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., recorded his own self-immolation, in protest of American support of Israel's current bombing campaign in Gaza.
In the days following, this event made it all over the news, the internet, social platforms, but a search for the name Aaron Bushnell will now return more stories of the man's life than the event, more images of him smiling and happy on some other day than on fire. Nevertheless, millions of Americans have seen him tall and straight, with the archetypal posture of a proud American serviceman, standing in a pool of fire, himself engulfed in flames. A powerful image, yes. But still controversial. Not enough to leave the audience unanimously speechless, the meaning of the action remaining hotly debatable. For the less faint of heart, there is being shared a heavily censored excerpt from his video, the blurred movement and sound giving context to the gruesome seriousness of the situation. For the truly truth-seeking, the complete video, in its original entirety, can be had with a couple adjectives accompanying his name in the query.
Aaron Bushnell's video starts like millions of other more lighthearted and frivolous videos being shown all over everyday: a young person walking and talking, filming themselves with their phone outstretched in one hand, a nice insulated stainless steel water bottle in the other. The street he walks on is tree-lined, and the day looks nice enough, sunny with a few clouds. But unlike so many other videos, this man is not a young woman in yoga clothes, with a smiling face and enthusiastic tone. He is serious and calm; he is in military combat uniform, and his nice insulated water bottle, clad in blue and red rubber and decorated with some white stickers, has no cap. It's more like a tall cup in his left hand.
Immediately, and simultaneously with the start of the video, he identifies himself.
"My name is Aaron Bushnell."
And then he tells us why we are here today.
"I am an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing 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."
He is calm, and his words come out smooth and clear as he is walking. His recitation doesn't falter once, and it's obvious his rehearsals have paid off.
He is finished with his speech about half-way to his destination, and the rest of his travel is done in silence. Off to the left of him are stout office buildings, all guarded by walls and sturdy black wrought iron fences. In the silence, we can hear his breathing deepen and quicken. There are signs of pain in his eyes. The opportunity to think after his recital seems to bring some wrenching thoughts, maybe he is giving his goodbyes to those he loves, the reality of his intentions setting in. There is anguish on his face, but never once do his feet stutter, every step is as sure as each of his his words.
On the wall of the last building before he arrives, we see: 3512 EMBASSY OF GHANA.
The site of the protest is a wide and long driveway of what appears to be the back entrance of what we now know is the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. The backdrop is a tall wrought iron gate, heavy enough to stop charging cars, spearhead spikes at the top, and covered in ivy, limiting visibility to the inside of the compound.
As soon as he gets there, he immediately, and very quickly, almost nonchalantly, sets up his phone in a location that perfectly points down the middle of the driveway to the front of the gate. He doesn't bother to adjust the picture. He knows what he's doing. It seems he has already done this before. It's strange that the phone's vantage is off the ground at about waist level, in the middle of a flat featureless driveway. What is the phone resting on that is not captured by the camera? How did it get there?
His shot is set, and his right hand is freed of his phone. Sequentially, he reaches into his right pocket and pulls something out as he turns to his left, walking away from the camera towards the gate. In a few steps he flicks the bucket from the brim, and we see that the something was a military issue cap, same as his uniform.
In a few more steps, for the first time we see Aaron Bushnell be anything other than careful and disciplined. He spills a small amount of liquid from the water bottle in his left hand as he is walking.
Three steps more and he turns around, his position perfectly in frame. He lifts the bottle and pours the contents out over the top of his head. He wets his face too, like he is relieving himself with cold water after a long, hot run. Sequentially he puts on his cap, and sequentially he reaches into his right pocket again. His left hand is still holding the water bottle. Full uniform, face grimaced, and with a deep breath in from his nose and out of his mouth, simultaneously he pulls out a lighter and gets rid of the bottle. This is the second time we see some carelessness from Aaron. A moderate splash of liquid that was still left inside becomes visible exiting its container as it all flies out of frame towards our right.
Simultaneously. He says, "Free Palestine." He whips the lighter in his hand outwards, like he is shooting his cuffs.
He bends his waist to reach his right leg. He tries three or four times. No luck. We can hear the sandy flicks; the tolerances on the flint mechanism sound loose. The lighter is cheap, disposable. We can hear the metal water bottle clang against the concrete as it rolls down the slanted driveway. Off camera, a voice, containing no urgency, asks, "Hi sir, may I help you?"
He switches to his left leg. Flicks a few times, no luck. Still bent, he shakes the lighter, tries a few more times. No luck. Still bent, he brings the lighter to his mouth and tries to blow it clean. He tries six or seven more times. No Luck. By now, God has given this man a dozen chances to change course. He is resolved to his mission. No one, nothing, can deny his resolution.
We hear the unseen rolling water bottle come to a stop. A light bulb goes off in Aaron's head, and he uses his wits to find the solution, indicating he still has them about him. He tries for the pool of fuel on the ground around his feet. He is successful the very first attempt.
There, he is standing on the surface of a small ocean, stormy with rageful red and orange waves, his fate all but completed. In the very short fraction of a moment before those violent flames climb up his body and into the sky, he straightens himself, again with a serviceman's dignified posture, raises up his arms and shakes them out towards the ground. With relief in his voice, the kind of relief one feels after overcoming a minor hiccup in the way of completing some menial task, Aaron Bushnell says, "Free Palestine." Says...
The flames race up his legs, completely cover his back, swing over his shoulder, and explode onto his face and chest.
"FREE PALESTINE!"
"FREE PALESTINE!"
"FREE PALESTINE!"
"FREE PALESTINE!"
He YELLS. At the top of his lungs. A full breath of super heated gasses drawn in to his depths and expelled with all the might of his burning body. Every time he yells. Altruistically, he gives all of his excruciating pain to his beneficiaries in Gaza.
Four times, he gives it everything he has. Each time, his whole body gathers all the burning breath he can possibly get and holds it in his core. Every time, he tensions his back and neck into a straight line and aims his face at a respectful while still respectable level, halfway between us and the sky. Every time, he drops his shoulders to drive his fists to the ground while lifting himself up on the balls of his feet. Each and every time, without even a microscopic trace of apprehension in his commitment, he affirms his convictions, thrusting them full force from his flesh, out of his throat. FREE PALESTINE! Into the sky. Into the hearts of his beneficiaries.
It's clear to all: his case for God to continue is far more compelling to God than God's case for him stop was to either.
The flames have now quickened to a sickening pace, and the fire is burning at the fuels capacity. Its heat can be imagined even through the phone's screen. The synchronicity of the whole of his body is lost as once coordinated movements give way to the alternating swinging of his arms. In an instant after, they are now moving independently of each other. He is thickly covered in an intensely active pain. A heavy ooze of stinging bees stuck to his body like an entire barrel of tar, the collective wind of all their buzzing wings seen in red, 15 feet tall. Their anger in black and shrieking in the air.
Momentarily, the pain steals his voice. He struggles with his entire body. He jumps, stamps his feet, swings his arms, fights, wrestles for control of and wins, finds his voice again. And now, finally, he does something for himself. He cries out in pain, three times, in the same manner as his "FREE PALESTINE!"s, though with less generosity towards himself than for his beneficiaries. I hope he didn't feel himself stingy or inadequate in those moments. I hope he understood the spirit leaving his body and directed through his throat became a trumpet of agony, transforming a savage sound into a song of empathy for those in Gaza. Solidarity in the suffering.
By now he is fatally injured, like a plane, once flying, then struggling to maintain balance, but at last being overtaken by turbulence and falling into a spin. Screaming at the top of his lungs, there is no amount of effeminacy in his voice. In his outcry there is aggression. His voice is deep and without softness. He asks for nothing. There is no pleading. He is accountable, honorable, remorseless. He is a real man.
The fire covering him is thick and dark. It is dense, and we can barely see the man through the flames' insistence. Him, the fire, and the smoke have now all become one entity. Aaron Bushnell is as tall as the sky. The flames are translating the meaning of his heart. His compassion, his recognition of the suffering, his willingness to make himself an equal with those burned in the distance. The intensity and completeness of his understanding. The fire's violent oration is forceful and unrelenting. We will know. We all must know. The black billows carry the words far away to those who need it, for those they were intended for. When the burnt, starving, shivering people of Gaza see Aaron Bushnell on their phones, they will surely be given enough strength to go on for just a little longer. He will live in their hearts immortally like the other men and women that gave away their bodies for their spirits to inspire life into the hopeless.
Through the fire's sermon and with the final will of his earthly self, Aaron Bushnell manages to proclaim "Free Palestine!" one last time. And he manages to sing one final verse for himself too. His task is complete. He did a good job. We can see the peace wash over him.
His struggling is over, and with relaxed surrender he walks in clockwise circles waiting for the flames to overtake him. He makes a couple revolutions in silence. The clothes are melting off him, large chunks falling to the ground. His sleeves are in tatters, and his pants legs are completely gone. His bare legs are fireless though an oily black. They are set in heavy burning boots. His revolutions end with him facing the right of our screens, on its very edge. From his profile, we see his body is no longer straight, but even though his knees are bent, his back curved, his shoulders slumped, he still demonstrates strength; he has been covered in fire and still stands.
And standing there, he convulses on his feet. We know his body's strength is finally gone. It's as if the last bit of his soul is rushing out from his bones and sputtering at its end. He takes one final step to turn towards the camera, and by his blackness, we see just how much he has given. He falls down, completely out of sight. His part is over.
Aaron Bushnell is now gone, but as his bare and burning legs flop back into frame, boots resting on their heels, knees bent and in the air, we are jolted back into reality of the world occurring around him. Their presence no longer overshadowed by his importance.
"Whose got a fire extinguisher?!" "Get a fire extinguisher!" "Whose got a fire extinguisher?!"
There are distant sirens.
The same man yells something that sounds like, "Call the board." Three times. I can't make it out enough to be sure.
The disposable lighter Aaron Bushnell used to start the fire is on the ground, by itself, still in the middle of the frame where he dropped it. Though the noise of chaos is quickly approaching, the picture itself is lonely, with only an open driveway and Aaron's legs sticking out from the right side. The lighter's plastic finally melts enough to release its pressurized gas in a hiss of visible mist. The gas doesn't ignite.
The sirens are getting close.
Another voice, a little deeper, but less loud and less passionate, yells his own, "Get me a fire extinguisher!" "Get the fire extinguisher." "Jesus Christ." And as two men run into frame, "AYE, GET THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER!" His passion now matches that of the first man.
The sirens are loud and here.
One of the two men that will now take over the scene is that of the first voice. The first man is tall and stocky, with brown skin, a clean shaven bald head. He has on black pants and shoes, a gun belt, a white short sleeve button-up with a long sleeve white t-shirt underneath. He has a fire extinguisher and is spraying it on Aaron Bushnell, moving in a circle around him, coming in and out of frame. The thick stream of white foam first turns the black smoke gray, then a dense white.
The second man comes in from the left edge and remains there, distant from Aaron. He is of medium build and medium height with short brown hair. He is dressed in all black. Black shoes, black pants, black jacket, black wrap around sunglasses. He has a black gun, and he has it outstretched and pointed at Aaron's soon to be corpse. The man is intensely focused, ready to neutralize any threat that presents itself from the burning, lifeless body. He maintains trigger discipline. He retracts his pistol and repositions himself when the man putting out the fire moves into his line of sight. The man in black is highly trained. Never once does he break protocol. He is the embodiment of his training.
A policeman enters on the left behind the man in black and throws a large, multi-compartment bag of supplies on the ground. He unzips it all open, but what is needed is not in there. He leaves, leaving the bag there agape.
The man in white has sprayed all his can, yet the fire is still burning. He moves into the middle of the frame. "I need a fire...I NEED FIRE EXTINGUISHERS."
There is a policewoman off camera. "They have it right here. It's coming. He says he has it." She runs past the middle of the screen, "ANOTHER ONE. ANOTHER ONE."
The man in white is off camera. "I don't need guns, I need fire extinguishers."
The police with fire extinguishers, and bulletproof vests, burst into the scene and put out the rest of the flames. The man with the gun expertly maneuvers around them, staying out of their way, yet never never leaving the threat unaccounted for.
A male voice very close says, "What is this?" The phone is picked up and the camera inadvertently pointed down the street. There are several police SUVs parked in the road with doors open and red-and-blue lights flashing, "holdonholdholdon," "stopstopstop." The camera is pointed down the sidewalk, the direction from where Aaron Bushnell originally came. The voice gets demanding. "What is this?!" "WHO IS THIS?" The video ends like that, but auto-replays back to the beginning.
"My name is Aaron Bushnell."
This video of Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation is perfect. All its details. All the nuances. From the end of "Who is this." To the beginning of "My name is Aaron Bushnell." The sincerity of his opening words put to question and then proven by the interrogative fire. The brutal honesty of these flames consuming this man every bit as honest as the fire consuming those men, women, and children so far away in Gaza. A protector in white, a defender in black. The way the highly flammable gas released from the lighter did not itself burn even amongst the inferno it started. Aaron Bushnell's protest is the fractal iteration of what he protests.
All the perceptions surrounding and all the spiritual and mental activity following, all the opinions and commentary, all the self-assured judgments, the same for this event as for that event. For both events, our knowledge based on heavily censored, yet minute, portions of the whole. And so our understandings not only incomplete, but far from complete. In the end, all the gravity of such important catastrophes, all the details and nuance, condensed and abridged into single iconic images that can evoke a strong momentary feeling, to remind us of some kind of far away substance, after the event has been forgotten and all the meaning lost.
Our chaos arrives just after the bodies have already been burned and fallen. So much of the commotion, here in safety but still within sight of danger, coming from those hungrily groping for a handful of the momentous affair so that they may have their own relic to present to any potential worshipers, donators, tithers.
At last, in the midst of incomplete knowing, the noisiness of the uncertainty of meaning in front of the profundity giving, among all those trying to explain the whole with a part, we resign ourselves, so as not to be alone in the confusion, to either this group or that one. The white shirted fire extinguishers or the stone cool defenders in black. Those that see a man in trouble, and those that see men with the potential to spread fires that can burn us and our things. Those empathizing with the protest, and those not.
It has been three weeks since Aaron Bushnell burned himself alive, and today we remember him in the same way we remember the fire that was started in Gaza just a little over five months ago. As something to be remembered. A reminder of where we stand. A reminder of a fire still burning that we have forgotten all about.
But as Aaron Bushnell has drifted out of our memories, he has swept across worlds not ours. He is a martyr in the Levant. His name is immortalized in Islamic lands. His image has made it as far as China. In the Palestinian town of Jericho they have named a street after him: Aaron Bushnell Street. In three weeks, the power and sincerity of his action has embedded his burning spirit in the hearts and minds of people all around the world.
While in three weeks, here, in his home and the place he was eternalized, he is already forgotten.
Looking up from the small circle around our feet, I realize we don't matter. In this great land of abundance and safety, our fates have been secured, our good lives all but guaranteed. We are too fed, fucked, rested, and protected to be impressed by a man that took his own life, in the most painful way imaginable, in order to donate his soul to the needy, those less, barely, and not at all shielded from the worst of this world. We cannot comprehend it.
He is stupid. He gave up his good life for nothing. A cheap stunt. A waste. A shame. A fool to be ridiculed or pitied. Aaron Bushnell died for his beliefs. For his beliefs?! Most of us have too many good things coming before and on top of something as intangible as our beliefs to be able to know them intimately. And to die for them? That is little more than a romantic notion to which we can readily claim we are inclined, only because chances are the opportunity to validate won't ever present itself.
Yes, at heart, we are all defenders of the Alamo. But we must all first think of our families, our friends, our lovers, all the wealth and objects we have amassed, our good luck that allows us to enjoy all of these good things in peace. So it is frightening to see that some man, with as much to lose as us, has decided so surely that none of those good things are worth more than his spirit. We are intimidated by his extreme willingness to prove it. We are so humbled by his donation of what he deemed, then proved, most valuable that we cannot respect Aaron Bushnell properly, because to do so would then threaten to diminish our own cherished valuations.
Half of us draw our guns on an already fallen man, half of us becoming non-factors. Half of us moving ourselves uselessly around the other even if the other, despite their efforts, can't make much of a difference. No matter the side, we are all safe. None of us matter.
Though, by not looking away, by not being satisfied with a blurry capture of a single moment of a much greater awe-inspiring event, I can see that there are those that have openly and gratefully accepted Aaron Bushnell's offering, out of need, out of recognition of selflessness, out of a deep understanding of the power of true generosity. There are those that are hungry, lonely, weary, and in danger. And in this world, there are more of them than us.
They are made of tougher stuff. They are lower than us with a daunting climb, yet are more hopeful. They grasp for a light in the distance while we are so close it blinds us. They are welcoming of inspiration when it is hard for us to recognize substance, even as a raging inferno right in front of our faces.
They are the world's potential, and we, at some time, will be put out to pasture. We can't see it now because we have been separated from the world, by our greatness. Because of our prosperity and the fullness of our good lives, we are too far away from them to see ourselves with their eyes. And we don't see that they and we are moving closer to each other by the day. Though we may not see, there are fires burning everywhere, both far and near. And those fires all burn, hurt, inspire, and empower. They all bring change, though we don't get close enough to make much of a difference. We are only intimate with ourselves.
Not until the brightness of Aaron Bushnell's fire could I see through the hard-earned assumptions of my own greatness. I realize there is a translucent barrier between what I can see and what of it I can feel. I now know there could only ever be the conception of truth by removing it, while watching it all burn.
