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Man protests war with immolation - and nobody notices

November 26th, 2006 by Double Tap

What a way to go - pouring gasoline all over yourself and then setting yourself on fire. It was, according to the suicide note, a protest against the war in Iraq. Unfortunately for Malachi Ritscher, nobody knew why he did the deed until days later. From the Associated Press story:

At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago near a statue of a giant flame, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire.

Aglow for the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation, a symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq.

“Here is the statement I want to make: 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,” he wrote in his suicide note. “… If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country.”

There was only one problem: No one was listening.

It took five days for the Cook County medical examiner to identify the charred-beyond-recognition corpse. Meanwhile, Ritscher’s suicide went largely unnoticed. It wasn’t until a reporter for an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, pieced the facts together that word began to spread.

Now, of course, there are all sorts of tributes to the guy. But still, kind of a waste of human life, don’t you think? Really, is this self-sacrifice going to end the war any sooner? Not likely.

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