The Art of Dying

 Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford

Are suicidal people the antidote to suicide bombers? Ostensibly the ISIS folks are trying to create unhappiness by killing as many infidels as possible and then shutting down human life. But what if they were encouraged? What if there victims said they wanted to die? Wouldn’t that take the power out of their punch? You have to fight fire with fire and make suicide not just an elite past time for poets and writers like John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and Virginia Woolf. Suicide is the ultimate form of passive resistance. Those who fell by their own hands would be in good company, with the likes of King and Gandhi. ISIS would be stopped dead by mass suicides. Fear is one of their basic weapons and it would be taken away. What if ISIS henchmen were about to launch one of their attacks and they found that their target had already succumbed to vats of the same poison that killed the Jim Jones cult. What would their Facebook postings look like then? Imagine tabloid headlines like, “Town Beats ISIS to the Punch. 300 Hundred Kick Bucket in Mass Protest.” Imagine the potential victims of a terror attack turning their Kalashnikovs against themselves. Imagine a bunch of ISIS thugs entering a concert hall or satiric magazine. Before they get off a shot, all their marks take their their own guns out of their desk drawers, stick their tongues out teasingly and then shoot themselves in their heads. A suicidal person is going to be just as angry, if not more so than any of the slew of murderers who used their victimized status to perpetrate atrocities. Suicidal people just turn their anger against themselves. Suicide is a powerful weapon that should be used in the war against terror. Here is Sylvia Plath from a poem called “Lady Lazarus:"

                    Dying is an an art, like everything else.
                    I do it exceptionally well.

                    I do it so it feels like hell.
                    I do it so it feels real.
                    I guess you could say I've a call.

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