Story of the Day: If a Man Self-Immolates on the Highway...

If an American consumed by the shared responsibility for the daily horrors in Iraq decides, in act of protest, to immolate himself on a busy highway yet the media doesn't report it, did it really happen?

Sadly, for this protester, the American public and the people of Iraq, the answer is no.

Yet that is what happened.

The death of Malachi Ritscher was reported by a local television station as just another frustration for commuters driving into Chicago one morning when police were told a statue was burning and slowing up traffic along the Kennedy expressway.

This was not how the anti-war activist had envisaged media coverage when, on November 3, he set up a video-camera and a small sign reading "thou shalt not kill" next to Chicago's Flame of the Millennium sculpture. He then doused his body in petrol and set himself on fire.

So instead of waking people "from their walking dream state," Ritscher's act went unnoticed by his fellow citizens, was ignored by the mainstream media at large and, in the case of that local television station, was reduced to an inanimate impediment to rush-hour traffic. A tragically ironic symbol of the very stupor from which he intended to shake Americans.

Ritscher, 52, had even written a lengthy "mission statement" on one of his many websites, saying: "If I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country."

...

Like Czech student Jan Palach in 1969, or Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in South Vietnam in 1963, he had chosen the most dramatic and agonising form of suicide to draw attention to his protest against the Iraq war. "What has happened to my country," he wrote, that it is "more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world?"

What Ritscher had not reckoned with was that people would continue to be more concerned with TV sport - and getting to work on time - as they drove past his flaming body.

Because of the mainstream media's failure to report his story, in favor of Tom and Katie's lavish wedding or O.J.'s new book, one more life was quietly snuffed out by this senseless war. In fighting against the moral lassitude of our nation, Ritscher became one more victim of it.

Fiery Freeway Suicide Slows Traffic, Not War
By Tom Baldwin
The Australian

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If a Man Self-Immolates on the Highway...