injured in the Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have destroyed or damaged more than half of the city’s homes and 88% of its school buildings. Seventeen of 36 hospitals have been rendered nonfunctional due to the damage, according to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Gaza has become the home of the largest number of amputee children in modern history. More than 4,000 children — about 10 a day — have lost a limb since the beginning of the conflict. Ultimately, it’s that fact that would lead Mena to set fire to his arm, a show of solidarity with those Palestinian children. But before he decided on such a drastic measure, Mena attempted to spotlight the issue as a journalist. Disillusioned with news coverage, Mena says he asked his bosses for permis- sion to create a documentary for the station about the history of the conflict. They weren’t interested, but Mena says he was allowed to work on the project in his own time. He dug in, feeling more and more as if mainstream news coverage “allowed truth to be bent and smeared and hidden.” He couldn’t allow himself “morally, in my heart and soul, to co-sign what I believe is helping contribute to the deaths of children.” His documentary would be his attempt at a corrective. Before long, though, he concluded that his journalistic reach exceeded his grasp. Someone else, a more seasoned documentarian, might be able to change minds with a piece of video jour- nalism. Mena instead found himself gravi- tating toward a much starker, much more dangerous way of grabbing attention. He would self-immolate for the cause. ‘Don’t need an arm to be happy’ When Mena decided to set himself on fire, he didn’t do it lightly. He knew he’d lose his job; as a jour- nalist, he couldn’t also be an activist. But he felt so strongly about the situation that he was willing to sacrifice his career, not to mention his arm. He felt sure that extreme measures were necessary to bring atten- tion to the children of Gaza. By choosing self-immolation, Mena was opting for what is considered the most extreme form of protest. The act of lighting one’s body on fire for a cause — and often giving one’s life in an excruciatingly painful way — originates with Buddhist teachings. According to Jon Coburn, a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln, Nebraska, who researches self-immola- tion, those who commit it tend to view the act less as suicide and more as a sign of utmost devotion to a community, religion or cause. Utmost it certainly is. Approximately 80% of hospitalized self- immolation patients die, according to the National Institutes of Health. The first modern public self-immola- tion occurred in 1963, when Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đảc set himself on fire to protest against the oppression of the South Vietnamese government. Vietnamese culture has a greater under- standing of self-immolation, Coburn says, but early on, Americans “just could not conceive suicide as protest” in their communities. Then a series of self-immo- lations occurred across the United States in reaction to the Vietnam War. About 60 people have self-immolated in the U.S. since the mid-1960s, Coburn says. In the U.S., self-immolating protests were either ignored or brushed off as crazed acts by news organizations that portrayed them as mental health episodes. Some people have self-immolated as a form of suicide rather than protest, but Coburn says “each act has its own motiva- tions and resonance and reasons.” Rowan Imran, a pro-Palestinian activist and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Arizona, recalled many people calling 25-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell “insane” after he self- immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. in February. But Imran has worked with enough patients to know not to throw that label around idly, even when someone sets themselves alight. “We don’t just see the symptoms that a patient displays and slap a diagnosis,” she says. “There has to be several things that a patient has to meet before you can even consider a mental health diagnosis. … That was very typical of the media to say, ‘Oh, he was disturbed, that’s why that happened.’” Mena was familiar with Bushnell, who set his whole body on fire and died from his burns. “It’s such as medieval form of protest, and to think that we would still engage in that kind of protest in 2024 was powerful,” Mena says. He wanted to make a similar statement but had no intention of suffering such a permanent fate. He would give his left arm — Mena is right-handed — but not his life. “I will continue to live my life happy, even if I lose an arm,” Mena says. “Don’t need an arm to be happy. You don’t need a leg to be happy and find satisfaction in your life. And I wanted to try to communicate that to the kids in Gaza who have inspired me to live a happier life.” As the idea congealed in his mind, Mena continued about his life. Two months before his fiery protest, he traveled on assignment for Arizona’s Family to Arizona’s southern border to cover a Donald Trump campaign visit. Standing behind the former and future president, with headphones on and camera in hand, his thoughts remained on Gaza. “In the back of my mind,” Mena says, “I was already aware I was going to go protest.” Nobody else was, though. Mena kept his plans to himself. When he left for Washington two months later, Mena told family and friends he was taking a peaceful drive up the California coast with a friend. The night before his protest, he sat on the bed of his Airbnb in D.C., grappling with a nauseating mix of emotions. By design, he’d left himself no one to talk to. He was committed but scared. He didn’t intend to take his life, but he’d been on plenty of crime scenes as a journalist to understand that things can go awry quickly. Just in case, he’d recorded video messages for his family members, created a will and returned a truck he was borrowing from an uncle. He thought about what Bushnell must have gone through. “I’m not getting cold feet,” he says, recounting his thoughts at the time. “But this is really, really real.” The protest and the aftermath As he walked through the protest in Black Lives Matter Plaza the next day, Mena set his protest in motion. In a post on X, Mena announced he’d be live-streaming on Instagram “from the White House exterior” in an hour. Within minutes of that post, Amber Warnock- Estrada responded with curiosity. Mena had met the Grand Canyon University senior through his brother, Dan. “I had no idea, that’s awesome!” Warnock-Estrada replied on X. “You with an org or is this all independent?” Soon, as Warnock-Estrada finished lunch in the living room of her mom’s Glendale home, a text message popped up on her phone. It was from Mena, asking her to watch. It gave no hint of what would follow, but she made sure to tune in. Around 4:30 p.m. EST, Mena stood on the outskirts of the protest, kaffiyeh wrapped around his shoulders. He began his livestream, reading from his printed speech that he also posted to his website. Throughout his almost 4,000-word address, Mena criticized the journalism industry, saying that “bothsidesism, or false balance, is the perverted, corrupted lazy byproduct of the marketplace of ideas existing in America as we know it Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal area in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. (Courtesy of Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages/CC BY-SA 3.0) >> p 13
