Nothing shocking: Aaron Bushnell, the Reverend Burns & the TikTok generation

A friend asked me what I thought of Aaron Bushnell. To be honest, I really didn’t have any thoughts. Sure, I read the story and visualized, with graphic detail, what happened, but it didn’t make me feel anything.

Strange.

It reminded me of those moments in movies, where the hero/villain chooses the exact wrong moment to do something and ends up looking foolish.

And I’m not calling this man foolish. Nor am I calling him a hero. I’m not calling him anything. What he did was completely out of left field and it is yet to be determined what, if any impact, it will have…on anything.

All I can say is that this young man chose the wrong era to make a statement like that. We live in the disposable era and we’re just barely on the other side of a mass media machine that made its bones by pumping as much nasty, vile and horrific news content into the stratosphere as possible 24/7/365, every second of every day for decades.

Most of us are, in a word, numb.

But desensitized or not, to see this kind of news story, while temporarily jarring, is unfortunately, in our hellish and perverted society, nothing shocking.

When I read the story I immediately thought of Bhuddist monk, Thích Quảng Đức. I wrote about him in my book, Amerikkkan Stories.

When the monk did what he did, the world took notice and the images of his protest burned themselves, figuratively, onto the soul of the world.

JFK noticed. Not long after, JFK would be assassinated and the world has never, ever been the same.

But this? This live stream suicide fed to the meme generation like digital hot Cheetos on a slow Sunday afternoon? Well, it’s already joke fodder for those critical of the act. And that took, what, a day?

We do not live in the kind of world that the monk burned himself in any more and the TikTok generation will soon forget about Bushnell’s protest once they’re done making memes about it.

That speaks volumes about our society.

In any event, I’ll share the piece from my book here (below) and leave it at that.