About that death in front of the Supreme Court | Will Bunch Newsletter
In the 20-plus years since the 9/11 attacks, Washington, D.C. has often looked like a city living endlessly on pins and needles. How many times has TV cable news dropped everything for a breathless breaking report on lockdowns from gunfire, real or imagined, or, heaven forbid, a low-flying airplane like the one last week for a parachute stunt at a Nationals baseball game that forgot to warn the Capitol Police?
In that nervous atmosphere, it’s somewhat stunning how little attention was paid last Friday evening when a man walked onto the plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, just a stone’s throw or two across from the Capitol, and lit himself on fire. The badly burned man was helicoptered to a D.C. hospital and pronounced dead on Saturday. You can be excused if you didn’t hear about it. There was little coverage, and the first threadbare pieces that did appear like this one from NBC News seemed remarkably incurious about who would do this, or why.
Now that we know more, it feels as if a city that pushes all the buttons when there’s a whiff of terrorism is utterly flummoxed by an apparent act of conscience.
The deceased was a 50-year-old climate-change activist from Colorado who chose Friday’s annual celebration of Earth Day to lodge the ultimate protest against humankind’s failure to act quickly or decisively about fossil-fuel pollution. For older folks like me, the news of a self-immolation in the nation’s capital brought back unwelcome memories of the Vietnam War era, when Buddhist monks over in South Vietnam and, famously in 1965, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker outside the Pentagon burned themselves to death to protest that conflict. Now, as back then, the shock of a self-immolation brings a flood of contradictory feelings.
In the case of what happened Friday at the Supreme Court, I feel as if we should absolutely not glorify the act — and yet it’s also impossible to ignore, given the growing stakes of the climate fight and the muddled place where we are right now.
I’m deliberately not mentioning the name of the man who died. Whatever one might feel about this particular man’s passion for saving our planet and for his Buddhist beliefs, which were apparently similar to the monks who self-immolated in the 1960s, I think we can all agree we desire no more deaths like this one. To the contrary, we need caring, engaged souls like the one that left us this weekend here on our embattled earth, fighting until their last given breath. And so maybe not glorifying the man or his words will help discourage others.
But I’ll also make one small exception, around the reason I’m writing this. Earlier this year on his active Facebook page, the man posted a picture of the Swedish youth climate striker Greta Thunberg with the question “What now adults?”
That’s a great question. In the first four months of 2022, I’ve been stunned to watch the widening disconnect between the urgent United Nations climate reports — that humankind has less than three years to make carbon pollution start going down instead of up — and the short-term thinking of world leaders who can always find a crisis, from a war in Ukraine to their sagging approval ratings, they can use to justify inaction or flip-flops.
That disconnect is a looming environmental and political disaster, but as a parent I also can’t stop thinking about what these betrayals by the so-called grown-ups are saying to the younger generations who were taught, correctly, that without immediate action they will enter adulthood along with rising sea levels, deadly droughts, and killer wildfires. We told these children that they were going to change the world, and if you haven’t thought about the consequences of then blowing off their marches and their climate strikes, maybe you should. Many youth activists are talking about the impact on their mental health.
“When leaders met with youth organizers and the streets were full of people marching for climate justice I thought for sure there was no way our cries for action would be ignored,” Jamie Margolin, a 20-year-old filmmaker and founder of the youth climate movement’s Zero Hour, wrote this month in a bitter essay titled “No More Empty Words.”
“In high school I thought it was sincere, all of the promises, all of these leaders and companies saying that they cared. It’s only recently that I realized there was something much more insidious going on. The Youth Climate Movement ᵀᴹ began to feel less like a movement for progress and more like a game show at the end of the world.”
Margolin is hardly an isolated case. Several full-time youth activists spoke recently to Teen Vogue about their mental-health struggles after devoting so much of their lives so far to the climate fight, and with progress so painfully slow. “We let it consume our lives and what we believe,” said Trinity Colón, a Chicago environmental justice activist since she was 16. “When somebody attacks you, it’s difficult to hear and it hurts you mentally and it hurts your spirit.”
What’s so frustrating right now is that — even with the world starting out the 2020s in a kind of a cosmic funk — we’ve actually shown in our other recent crises that today’s humans can still rise up to meet big problems, like developing working vaccines against COVID-19 in less than a year, or slipping antitank missiles to Ukraine to fight back a Russian invasion. All these young people want is the same urgency about the fate of the planet.
Today’s young Americans need a message of hope — that it’s not too late to stave off the worst climate impacts, if we start today — from their parents, their teachers, and from their leaders. That would be good for our big outdoors, and good for the inner well-being of the people who live here.
It feels as if ignoring a man immolating himself at the Supreme Court is a tragic but accurate metaphor for the way we treat climate change writ large. Sure, we can try to prevent the next one by not talking about it, but that’s not really the right answer. If you truly don’t want moral people with a troubled conscience setting themselves on fire, the world’s decision-makers need to start showing their own humanity by attacking a planetary crisis with the urgency of war.
Or to put it simply ... what now adults?
In the 20-plus years since the 9/11 attacks, Washington, D.C. has often looked like a city living endlessly on pins and needles. How many times has TV cable news dropped everything for a breathless breaking report on lockdowns from gunfire, real or imagined, or, heaven forbid, a low-flying airplane like the one last week for a parachute stunt at a Nationals baseball game that forgot to warn the Capitol Police?
In that nervous atmosphere, it’s somewhat stunning how little attention was paid last Friday evening when a man walked onto the plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, just a stone’s throw or two across from the Capitol, and lit himself on fire. The badly burned man was helicoptered to a D.C. hospital and pronounced dead on Saturday. You can be excused if you didn’t hear about it. There was little coverage, and the first threadbare pieces that did appear like this one from NBC News seemed remarkably incurious about who would do this, or why.
Now that we know more, it feels as if a city that pushes all the buttons when there’s a whiff of terrorism is utterly flummoxed by an apparent act of conscience.
The deceased was a 50-year-old climate-change activist from Colorado who chose Friday’s annual celebration of Earth Day to lodge the ultimate protest against humankind’s failure to act quickly or decisively about fossil-fuel pollution. For older folks like me, the news of a self-immolation in the nation’s capital brought back unwelcome memories of the Vietnam War era, when Buddhist monks over in South Vietnam and, famously in 1965, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker outside the Pentagon burned themselves to death to protest that conflict. Now, as back then, the shock of a self-immolation brings a flood of contradictory feelings.
In the case of what happened Friday at the Supreme Court, I feel as if we should absolutely not glorify the act — and yet it’s also impossible to ignore, given the growing stakes of the climate fight and the muddled place where we are right now.
I’m deliberately not mentioning the name of the man who died. Whatever one might feel about this particular man’s passion for saving our planet and for his Buddhist beliefs, which were apparently similar to the monks who self-immolated in the 1960s, I think we can all agree we desire no more deaths like this one. To the contrary, we need caring, engaged souls like the one that left us this weekend here on our embattled earth, fighting until their last given breath. And so maybe not glorifying the man or his words will help discourage others.
But I’ll also make one small exception, around the reason I’m writing this. Earlier this year on his active Facebook page, the man posted a picture of the Swedish youth climate striker Greta Thunberg with the question “What now adults?”
That’s a great question. In the first four months of 2022, I’ve been stunned to watch the widening disconnect between the urgent United Nations climate reports — that humankind has less than three years to make carbon pollution start going down instead of up — and the short-term thinking of world leaders who can always find a crisis, from a war in Ukraine to their sagging approval ratings, they can use to justify inaction or flip-flops.
That disconnect is a looming environmental and political disaster, but as a parent I also can’t stop thinking about what these betrayals by the so-called grown-ups are saying to the younger generations who were taught, correctly, that without immediate action they will enter adulthood along with rising sea levels, deadly droughts, and killer wildfires. We told these children that they were going to change the world, and if you haven’t thought about the consequences of then blowing off their marches and their climate strikes, maybe you should. Many youth activists are talking about the impact on their mental health.
“When leaders met with youth organizers and the streets were full of people marching for climate justice I thought for sure there was no way our cries for action would be ignored,” Jamie Margolin, a 20-year-old filmmaker and founder of the youth climate movement’s Zero Hour, wrote this month in a bitter essay titled “No More Empty Words.”
“In high school I thought it was sincere, all of the promises, all of these leaders and companies saying that they cared. It’s only recently that I realized there was something much more insidious going on. The Youth Climate Movement ᵀᴹ began to feel less like a movement for progress and more like a game show at the end of the world.”
Margolin is hardly an isolated case. Several full-time youth activists spoke recently to Teen Vogue about their mental-health struggles after devoting so much of their lives so far to the climate fight, and with progress so painfully slow. “We let it consume our lives and what we believe,” said Trinity Colón, a Chicago environmental justice activist since she was 16. “When somebody attacks you, it’s difficult to hear and it hurts you mentally and it hurts your spirit.”
What’s so frustrating right now is that — even with the world starting out the 2020s in a kind of a cosmic funk — we’ve actually shown in our other recent crises that today’s humans can still rise up to meet big problems, like developing working vaccines against COVID-19 in less than a year, or slipping antitank missiles to Ukraine to fight back a Russian invasion. All these young people want is the same urgency about the fate of the planet.
Today’s young Americans need a message of hope — that it’s not too late to stave off the worst climate impacts, if we start today — from their parents, their teachers, and from their leaders. That would be good for our big outdoors, and good for the inner well-being of the people who live here.
It feels as if ignoring a man immolating himself at the Supreme Court is a tragic but accurate metaphor for the way we treat climate change writ large. Sure, we can try to prevent the next one by not talking about it, but that’s not really the right answer. If you truly don’t want moral people with a troubled conscience setting themselves on fire, the world’s decision-makers need to start showing their own humanity by attacking a planetary crisis with the urgency of war.
Or to put it simply ... what now adults?
