The Limit Does Not Exist
Aaron Bushnell is no longer complicit in genocide.
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“To accept the premise of birth is to invite the eventuality of death.”
Author La Marr Jurelle Bruce describes in his novel How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind the life of “Afrofuturist, Afrocentric bandleader and pianist, Sun Ra.” Ra didn’t believe in birth certificates because they are simply “chronologies that stifle human life.”
In 1942, when Ra was twenty-eight years of age, he was conscripted into the US Army while living in Birmingham, Alabama. After rejecting his conscription, he was summoned before a court where he declared to a looming crowd of white, powerful men that if he was given the knowledge and the means to kill as a soldier, he would not hesitate to use these skills against the white powerful men who call themselves “captains and generals.” Stunned by this blatant threat, the court sent Ra to prison for three months, where he (may have) feigned madness in order to be released by his captors. It is not clear whether he was actually experiencing madness or if it was a tactic. Either way, Ra did not subscribe to the world of confines and structure. His music was an expression of his desire for the infinite, an attempt at reaching a limitless potential. Madness is then a tool for reaching the potentiality of the self.
Imagine the way a child scribbles violently and with reckless abandon over a clearly outlined drawing.
This child does not have the desire to ‘stay within the lines’ of this drawing, nor is it a pure act of defiance. To be clear, I am not likening the rebellion of Sun Ra to that of a mindless child; to be even clearer, I am saying that children are not mindless. They scribble because they want to; it pleases their mind and resonates with the soul. They simply have not been socially conditioned to live within the confines of the world around them, because to them, the lines either don’t exist or are simply irrelevant. Children are smart in this way; they don’t fear being punished for rejecting the norm. Furthermore, the norm is not something to be rejected, it just hasn’t been ingrained into their psyche yet. To that end, the child is reaching a sort of limitless potential.
The title of this essay may be a phrase that sounds familiar to you, “The limit does not exist,” you may have heard it either in math class or in Mean Girls. The meaning of this phrase refers to the quality of a function (aka a line on a graph) in which the x or y value continues infinitely in a direction towards a particular value, but never reaches that finite value. The line continues infinitely, forever and ever, getting closer and closer to 0, but never actually reaching a value of 0.
In a similar sense, our limitless potential is a source of infinite creativity and life, but once we attempt to give it a finite definition, it ceases to be infinite. We can only ever reach for something and never actually grasp it if we wish to be ‘limitless.’
I have borrowed this concept of ‘limitation —> limitlessness’ from Ralph Cintron’s book Democracy as fetish. In this book, Cintron describes the ways in which our governments fetishize the promise of democracy to keep us from rebelling against the true limitations of our reality. At the same time, we also fetishize democracy by striving to reach something that does not exist, while also pretending that it does and can exist. He also dives into the evasiveness and ghostly impression of ‘god-terms’ such as freedom, democracy, and happiness. These are words that can never truly be universally defined. They are different for everyone and evolve through space in time in ways that we can hardly grasp. Similarly to my explanation of the mathematical concept of a limit reaching infinity, our perception of the word “democracy” can never truly capture the essence of the word. Maybe because the true definition of “freedom” or “democracy” does not exist, therefore there is no limit to how it can be defined. Cintron takes this a step further and explores the reason behind why we feel the need to be limitless in a finite world. The object of limitlessness is not just a desire that one wishes to fulfill, but it is also in ratio with their limitation, and this goal of limitlessness is to be "free of the burdens of limitation" (Cintron p.22).
Aaron Bushnell is another example of this attempt to move from limitation —> limitlessness. On February 25th, 2024, Bushnell self-immolated outside of the israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. Immediately before his self-immolation, he said on a live-stream:
I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
His last words pierced through the fiery blaze as he repeatedly screamed, “Free Palestine.”
A Secret Service officer witnessed this and his first reaction was to yell to the man on fire to “get on the ground.”
Aaron Bushnell's extreme act of protest has immortalized him as a microcosm of the frustration many of us feel with our own complicity. Aaron Bushnell is no longer complicit in genocide. In a way, he reached a certain limitlessness. As his words echoed on the live-stream, his message was too clear to misconstrue. The colonizers of the world have been using us to carry out their wars, their genocides, their settlements, and their profits. The ruling class has decided that this is normal, and that we must accept and even support these structures of white supremacy. What makes his message even more clear to anyone who hears his story is that he was in the US Air Force and he was a white man. Both of these markers of identity give him merit in the eyes of a white American that he must know what he is talking about. If Aaron Bushnell was a black man or woman, his participation in the US Air Force wouldn’t have given him much merit. If Aaron Bushnell was not in the US Air Force, then his career and social identity would have been questioned and disregarded. I believe that Bushnell knew that his status as an active duty member and as a white man gave his actions even more weight, and scaled his words closer to ‘being in a state of truth’ to the general public.
Politicians and conspiracy theorists (often one in the same) can speculate about the state of his mental health, some can even call him a terrorist (a word which has lost most of its meaning), but these speculations hardly allow them to deny the motivations behind his actions, precisely because he stated them clearly and intentionally. If one were to deny the merit of his identity as a white male active duty member of the US Air Force, they’d be offending and unraveling the entire institution of the US Army, an institution that they value oh-so dearly.
Aaron Bushnell had a choice; he could either continue to serve and be limited in his ability to be avoid complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, or he could attempt to reach an out-of-bounds, off-limits infinite reality where he is no longer complicit. Bushnell's death was a tragedy. And I have no insight on the state of his mental health and cannot comment on whether or not this was an act of mental instability. However, I think an even bigger tragedy would be for us, as Americans and people in the West, to ignore the message he was trying to send to us. It would be a failure on all of our parts to not recognize the value of his words and deep relevance of his actions.
What does it say that our society produces people like Aaron Bushnell who previously subscribed to the promise of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ but eventually concluded that they would rather die than continue in their complicity?
We are brought up in this country to believe that the only way to succeed is to get a good job so that you can make good money so you can get an ever better job and make even more money. It is an endless cycle of dissatisfaction with our current lives, constantly striving to obtain an infinite amount of resources and opportunities. But we do not live in an infinite world; our lives on Earth are finite, and her resources are finite. We are encouraged to follow this mindset of infinite growth, but we are not shown the reality. The reality is that everyTHING we have is because of the exploitation of others, and because we are never taught this in schools, so many of us are ignorant to this reality. Many people live their entire lives without thinking about where their clothes come from, their phones, their cars, etc. We grow up thinking that THIS is what life is, and these are comforts guaranteed to every American. But this is a dangerous mindset, because once we start to feel entitled to these material things, we feel inclined to ignore the blood that is being shed in order for us to have these things in the first place.
RIP Aaron Bushnell.
Free Palestine.