Jan Palach + my mother

I mentioned my idea that environmental activists should throw themselves under horses to my mother on Tuesday, while we were eating pizza at my cousin's 12th birthday party.

She said she remembered very clearly watching the funeral of Jan Palach, the first non-Vietnamese man to burn himself alive in the 1960s. He was protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She remembered watching the funeral procession, and the impact seeing it had made on her. Then she said she often dreamed of "doing that" - of self-immolation in protest. And I felt shaky and said something flippant and wished that it wasn't true.