Suicide and alienation

The pattern of young queer suicides continues in the news, a deadly erratic drumbeat, summoning... what?

It seems to me these suicides are an extreme form of the escapism and self harm that homophobia and transphobia drive us to. It seems to me these suicides are an inevitable result of the alienating machinery of patriarchal capitalism and colonialism, a social human sacrifice, that our culture believes is acceptable and necessary to keep the gears of production and reproduction moving. It is the same hand that ties nooses around our children's necks, that pushes them out of airplanes into war, that chains them to factory floors performing endless muscle tearing tasks, that hands them their first and, much later, their last cigarette, that pumps them full of desire and disease, that slams them against walls and humiliates them for something they've said or thought, that closes the door on them in forgotten cells in forgotten islands for long forgotten reasons.

Unlike the acceptable escapisms of consumerism, alcohol, narcotics, overwork, and beating your children, suicide is a clarion crisis call. Its fatality is its fatal flaw. If one could survive suicide, it would be just, as the expression goes, another cry for help. And what, we wonder, stops children from literally crying for help, and what, we should ask, stops us from hearing those cries?

No form of escape is as illusory as suicide, though they are all illusory. Suicide also holds out another promise - that of real change, which is not an illusion, but is nevertheless tragic in its implication.

Those who commit suicide successfully will never see the better world they could catalyze. The classic fantasy, to be present at one's own funeral post-suicide, neatly captures this paradoxical but human desire. To make them sorry, to wake people up from the inhuman devaluing of young life that doesn't quite fit into the the machine, this is another desire imperfectly expressed through suicide. To be a martyr means never making it to the promised land. For the suicides to stop, we must need no more martyrs, and we must instead seek only miracles.

What kinds of miracles are needed? Compassion is one, and hope is another. Compassion for the suffering of the bullied and the bullying, who, regardless of age, are as much victims as those they target. Hope for each other that refuses to die, despite our seemingly individual failures, and despite the overwhelming omnipresence of the machine. Because of course, that machine is us, and, as, one by one, erratically, we withdraw our consent, its cruel grinding will stop, and there will be no more young bodies, there will be no need for the blunt instrument of the ultimate "no."