At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 - (Malachi) 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.
A glow 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 US 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.
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.
...only Ritscher knew the motivations for his suicide. There is little doubt, though, that he was satisfied with his choice.
"Without fear I go now to God," Ritscher wrote in the last sentence of his suicide note. "Your future is what you will choose today."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112706T.shtml
>Google News has collected this month from English language newspapers around the world 213 articles with the words "malachi ritscher"
~You would think there would be more public suicides in the news? There are editorial guidlines that keep these stories from inspiring depressed dimwits?
Posted by Stubbornson at November 28, 2006 02:17 PM