tw: mentions of death/suicide

The title sucks, I know, but this is a hard truth that a lot of people have come across when advocating for a change in a system. A common pattern that I’ve seen emerge is that the only time actual change has happened is after someone has lost their life. When the people held in Pelican Bay were on a hunger strike, real change only started when a prisoner named Billy ‘Guaro’ Sell had passed away after succumbing to the starvation he and other prisoners put themselves through to protest the inhumane conditions that the SHU had put them through. Another example of this is when Thich Van Duc, a Vietnamese monk, set himself on fire in protest of the Diem regime’s oppression against Buddhist monks. A response to the oppression only happened when a whole bunch of people saw this self-emulation and started talking about the oppression against the monks. So why is this the case? Why is it that only certain types of change happen when someone has already lost their life?

I think one of the reasons for this is that negativity attracts attention, and the more negativity, the more attention. Lots of people believe that death is one of the most negative things that can come from a protest; because death is supposed to be private and sacred. You’re supposed to die with your family in a hospital bed in peace. The last thing you’re supposed to do is die with everyone watching, to die while still fighting for the future that you’ll never be able to experience. Those kinds of deaths are so unnatural and so negative that you can’t help but not look away. In turn, this makes more people pay attention to what’s going on, and they ask questions like “how can we prevent this from happening again?” Another thing that these deaths have in common is that they were heavily shared and televised, so they were inescapable; everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with the fact that you live in a system that is okay with the fact that people are dying in this way

Protests are the most effective when everyone is watching, so things like hunger strikes and self-immolation are very effective ways to protest becuase it forcefully grab people’s attention in the most violent way possible. This violence makes people uncomfortable, which makes them have to confront the system that they live in, which allows conditions that lead up to that. Yes, I know that it should never have to get to this point, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re living in a world that is designed to kill you if you’re not the big 3 (white cis male). I would also like to add that I think that these kinds of protests are very powerful because, to me, it sends a final message of “look at what I have to do for you to see us.” And I think someone making a sacrifice like that so that others’ voices can finally be heard is beautiful and depressing at the same time.