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Aaron Bushnell’s Self-Immolation
          “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest
          but compared to what people have been experiencing
          in Palestine… it is not extreme at all. This is what our
          our ruling class has decided will be normal”
              –Aaron Bushnell, U.S. Airman

Aaron Bushnell, the airman, set himself on fire
on a cold, February Sunday morning,
In his tragic protest against the new “normal”
of butchering Palestinians, as the Nazis once did to Jews,
Now the murders, the killers, the Israelis
and Americans— those colonizers
with their sophisticated acid tongues
that deny or feign horror of the gaping wounds of the dead
in Gaza and the Left Bank on a Sunday morning.

Americans were having their morning coffee.
lounging on their sofas watching with eyes half-open
those crude, sport channels,
or fighting with their spouses or making love with them
out of the boredom of the day in America,
The complacencies of eating their organic oranges
and sipping their Fairtrade teas,
caring less about those who died by the thousands in fire
in raging and silent Gaza.

Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire on a Sunday morning,
The day not blissful nor imperishable,
As a poet once wrote about another Sunday morning,
But this death by fire on a Sunday morning
has taught us what Heraclitus knew—
“Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire,”
Such is this great death on a Sunday morning.

 

Luis Lázaro Tijerina was born in Salina, Kansas. Mr. Tijerina has a Master of Art degree in history, concentration being military history and diplomacy. He is a published author of military theory, short stories, essays and poetry. Mr. Tijerina resides in Vermont.