Fiery anti-war statement goes unseen, unheard
{Malachi Ritscher} carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family. On his website, the 52-year-old experimental musician who'd fought with depression even penned his obituary.
At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before an election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Mr. 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.
(snip)
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, Mr. 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.
This didn't make your local news because it's not pleasant; it won't help sell aspirin or Chevy trucks. It will make you think, it will make you act. So it's better that no one tell you about this. The article goes on to speculate at length that Ritscher was depressed. As if the sane thing to do is be happy and grateful when your tax dollars and your country's reputation are being used to kill thousands.
I can't condone his form of protest, but how in God's name can the media decide for the past three weeks that this isn't newsworthy?