Woke up this morning to the news about Max Azzarello burning himself outside the courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush money trial is taking place. I read Max was a nice man, which I do not doubt. I read he was smart and thoughtful, which I do not doubt either. And I read that since his mother passed away in 2022, he has gone crazy, slipping into paranoia and confusion, which I do doubt.
It makes sense that the pain of losing his mom mixed with his intelligence and idealism and whatever other combinations of personal and political disappointment he suffered led him to the conclusion that burning himself was the right thing to do. But dismissing his decision only as an act of mental illness is not enough. There is more to talk about.
What if he was right? And we are wrong? Not right about the conspiracy theories he believed in. But right in the moral sense. What if he is right that there is “something” very wrong. And what if, just like the defendant in that courthouse wants exemption, our dismissal of his gesture as an act of insanity is simply a way of not being implicated in that grand something?
I guess what I am saying is, what if Max wasn’t crazy? What if he just cared too much? What if he felt too much for other people and for the world? — Even if those feelings misled him. And what if, instead of casting his sacrifice aside, we considered what the world would be like if we were a little more like him and a little less like us? Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have had to light himself on fire to get our attention.
Funny. Of all the things I read, I didn’t see that anywhere.
