Suicide
Suicide is Painless
Through
early morning fog I see
Visions
of the things to be,
The
pains that are withheld for me,
I
realize and I can see...
That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.
The game
of life is hard to play,
I'm
going to loose it anyway,
The loosin' card I'll someday lay;
So this
is all I have to say...
That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.
The only
way to win is cheat
And lay
it down before I'm beat
And to
another give my seat
For
that's the only painless feat.
That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.
And you can do the same thing if you
please.
(Mash Theme Song)
(Mike
Altman and Johnny Mandel)
Jonathan Aurthur
John Johnson
Jonathan Aurthur
passed away on Nov. 22, after leaping into the
Jonathan was also a member of the
Sixties group Newsreel. My friend Paul Shinoff who
passed away a few years ago was a founding member of that group. It produced
documentaries about activists,
The story of his suicide starts with
his own son's leap onto the Santa Monica Freeway due to mental illness, and
Jonathan's efforts to deal with that. In recent years, he, like a lot of
progressive activists, had a hard time finding a regular job and was in extreme
debt.
To paraphrase Albert Camus, suicide is a logical answer to the contradiction
between our consciousness of the universe and ourselves
and the actual limited nature of our physical lives. But suicide is rarely committed for logical
reasons. It's almost always for some emotional reason Even something trivial such as being
snubbed by a friend can push one over the edge if everything else that day
stacks up too heavily to bear. (and as we know today,
from chemical reasons such as bipolar disease).
And in some way the reelection of
Bush was said to be one of those final straws for Aurthur.
But since when has this system
allowed a real progressive to have real power? We need to built a movement and
community that always fights for progressive issues for their own sake . That movement must survive on its own, have its own
resources, be they monetary or emotional. We will win
battles and we will lose some, but if you can't live with such horrors as the
slaughter in
This Re-New Year, 2005, will be time
for us to take a fresh look at the job - the hard but extremely worthwhile
effort - of creating a more just society and world. Of coming up with new ways
to communicate our visions for a more progressive system. We have the
opportunity to learn better ways of relating to each other and building our own
communities. Jonathan and Gary Webb should not have had to feel that suicide
was the way out. Deep emotional issues aside, there must be ways to help one
another nurture and foster hope in our own communities. Placing our hopes in
the fundamentally flawed and corrupt
We need to create a space within our
movements and ourselves. Not space as in real estate, but space as in infinite,
timeless, room for all. A nonjudgmental and forgiving space.
Filled only with an objective moral and principled love.
With room enough for everyone, including ourselves.
Some people will declare, and behave
as though, they have no room for the problems of others, especially personal
problems. But does a mother run out of love because the one who needs it is her
4th child? Is the room in her heart finite?
Does it matter if ten or 10,000 Iraqi's are bombed by our own country
for one to be concerned? We can't solve all problems but we can have the sense
and the will to begin to act always according to the truth as it clarifies
within ourselves.
The MASH theme song was inspired by
a scene in the film where one of the doctors decided to commit suicide. The
other doctors agreed to help him take his life, but instead gave him a mild
anesthetic and had a nurse give him oral sex. The doctor's suicide wish
vanished.