Writing in the New York Times less than a week later, the novelist Nathan Englander asked why Buckel’s death received so little attention compared with the “AR-15-level attention that we give the very worst among us”, mass killers. There was no Prague spring or Tunisian revolution for the planet. The mass action Buckel had hoped for did not come. But in a reactive 24-hour news cycle, the story was rapidly buried by the ongoing drama of the Mueller investigation and airstrikes on Syria. It is difficult to say why some incidents of self-immolation are perceived as mental health tragedies and others as considered political acts why some became enduring political iconography and others are relegated to obscurity and why some catalyze change and others don’t.īuckel had led a distinguished legal career, and worked on famous cases including the Nebraska hate crime that inspired the film Boys Don’t Cry for that reason, as well as the shocking circumstances of his death, his death received national news coverage. Sometimes mobilization does come: when Mohamed Bouazizi, an impoverished fruit vendor in Tunisia, set himself on fire in 2011 to protest government corruption, it catalyzed a mass protest that toppled the country’s dictatorship and inspired similar movements across the Arab world. Before he died of his burns, Palach said his target was less the Soviet regime itself than the fatalism and despair he feared had overcome his fellow citizens.ĭespite the risk of copycats, most people who have committed political self-immolation have indicated that they hoped to inspire mass mobilization, not further death. He may have also known of Norman Morrison, a Quaker who killed himself in front of the Pentagon to protest against the Vietnam war.Īround the same period, Jan Palach, a university student in Prague, self-immolated in an attempt to rally Czechoslovaks against Soviet occupation. As someone who came of age during the Vietnam war, he was also surely familiar with the iconic photograph of Thich Quang Duc, a Saigon monk who self-immolated to protest against South Vietnamese persecution of Buddhists. His statement referred to the Buddhist monks who have burned themselves to death to protest against the occupation of Tibet. But his writing made it clear he viewed his death in political terms and hoped it would galvanize mass action.ĭavid Buckel at Red Hook Community Farms. None of Buckel’s family or friends were aware of his intent, and we will never know for certain whether pre-existing mental distress may have contributed to his decision to take his life. “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” he wrote. With characteristic care, he also left a short note at the scene for emergency personnel. “y early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result,” his statement said. He made his way to a stretch of grass, where he emailed media outlets a statement decrying humanity’s passivity in the face of pollution and global warming.Ī few minutes later, he doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. “I only wish,” he said, “that David had stuck it out.”Įarly on the morning of 14 April 2018, Buckel – a 60-year-old retired gay rights attorney – left his cozy, garden-surrounded Brooklyn house and walked to nearby Prospect Park. The site was a microcosm, he said, of the kind of self-sustaining, harmonious society Buckel wanted to build – the kind “I think in some ways we all subconsciously long for”. When I asked him about the site, he thought carefully, then said: “There is something very simple and pure in coming together, in giving up your time, to take people’s food scraps and do the work that will enable those scraps to be turned back, over time, into food.” Terry Kaelber, Buckel’s husband and companion of 34 years, often volunteers at the compost site. On the other side of the lot grew rows of spinach, kale, tomatoes and other crops, which the farm sells or donates to food pantries. Energy from the turbine, plus several solar panels, fed into a generator that pumped air into the compost heaps not being churned by hand. He didn’t elaborate but said he considered the site Buckel’s legacy, and that he and the other two managers felt honored to carry on its work.Īs the manager talked, a small wind turbine whizzed overhead. A woman asked, hesitantly: “Is he the one who … self-immolated?”
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