Don’t you ever feel tired of all the chaos?

Tired of wave after wave of catastrophic climate change and geopolitical crisis? Tired of waiting for everything to collapse?

How can things get better when the probability of blue ocean events is rising with each successive summer? Each cycle will increase oceanic and atmospheric warming, which will disrupt jet streams and rainfall patterns, triggering prolonged droughts and floods and massive famines.

Millions of people will be displaced, causing wide-scale social upheaval and, eventually, the collapse of any recognisable form of human civilisation. Billions of people will perish.

The first blue ocean event will likely happen in the next ten years. Things will start to seriously fall apart from then on. First slowly and then all at once.

Someone should put the world on suicide watch. But who?

Life as we know it is ending and the future of humanity will be unsparing in its violence and desolation. Death wails rising above the grief and horror.

Things are bad - as bad as they’ve ever been - and they’re going to get a lot worse, a lot faster than most people think.

The only way to turn it around is for everyone to wake up. But how? It will take more than clever spin and the occasional street protest. More than throwing cold soup at paintings in public galleries. More than gluing yourself to roadways and traffic crossings.

Shock tactics are really the only way to cut through our collective fugue, to short-circuit our apathy. Shocking acts like Wynn Bruce setting himself on fire outside the US Supreme Court last year to protest against inadequate climate change policies.

It was a wake up call. It wasn’t senseless. It was the act of a disciplined and rational mind.

Two months earlier the Supreme Court heard arguments on a critical environmental case aimed at restricting or even eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to control pollution. Conservative judges with lifetime appointments voiced skepticism of the agency’s authority to regulate carbon emissions and address climate change. Doubted the government should play any role in combatting a climate breakdown.

Wynn travelled from Boulder, Colorado, to Washington DC by bus. He walked up to the plaza of the Supreme Court around 6:30pm on Earth Day, Friday, April 22. It was a cool evening as he sat down, doused himself in lighter fluid and set himself ablaze. There was no note, no need for explanation.

His friend and Zen Buddhist priest Kritee Kanko said his self-immolation wasn’t suicide but a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to our climate crisis.

He succumbed to his injuries in a nearby hospital early the next day.

Thank you for reading this chapter of “The Sorrows”, an experimental serial novel about the end of the world written in real-time by Stefano Boscutti. Subscribe now to receive the next chapter in your inbox. There’s no charge and you can unsubscribe at any time.