Ethics

There's this person, Z., whom I barely know. I was arrested with him after the Halloween 2004 Critical Mass, so we spent a couple hours in jail together. The 5th precinct jail I was in was reserved for the ladies but through the bars of the cell I watched him and some poor German? Eastern European? South African? man who could not speak a lick of English get fingerprinted and catalogued. Z. seemed fine, upbeat, at home, even--it was not the first time he'd been arrested in a protest or protestesque situation. After the cops processed his information, they took him and the other man away. When I saw Z. the next day for a press conference Time's Up was doing about the arrests--hello, Colin Moynihan--he told me that he and the other guy had been taken to the Tombs under 100 Centre Street, kept down there until the early morning, when he was shuffled from office to office through interminable corridors until he finally was lead to a door that opened out onto the street. No explanation, and no charge, even! Z. didn't have to go to court like me and the other arrestees did.

At the press conference, we all said our schpiels. 49 Houston is poorly illuminated and also leased out by a guy who collects antique European bars (yes, entire bars) and resells them to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars, so the interior decorative scheme inside is a mash of haphazard activist kitsch and signage, broken found furniture, and advertisements for very expensive hand-lathed barstools. We stood in front of it all, at an ancient podium, with spotlights from Channel 1 dully reflected in the mahogany veneer and into our eyes, and told our disoriented sob stories. When it was my turn to speak, I tried that self-loathing educated-activist strategy of overbilling myself and being hyperarticulate--I think I said I "worked near Wall Street" just to glean whatever capitalist cred that could get me, though 90 William Street and a little queer non-prof isn't exactly Merrill Lynch. Z. got up, talked about being pushed around by cops, and insisted on using his weird one-word nickname instead of his proper name. Afterward, we shook hands with Norman Siegel and congratulated ourselves on jobs well done. Laura, Amy, Vincent and I walked down to Chinatown for pastries and bubble teas.

I haven't anything about Z. since then, until yesterday. Laura used to live with Z. at Casa del Sol, the South Bronx squat I mentioned in a previous post. Laura's doing a story about hibernation for Weekend America, and she remembered a story Z. had told her about lapsing into a trance-like hibernation state for a spell, five winters ago. She wrote to mutual friends trying to reach him, and one of those friends forwarded a message Z. had sent earlier this week. An excerpt:

I know of no way to end war, disorder and this world of human disaster (though
never fail to amaze at its beauty).

...In the spirit of Crazy Horse, I
plan to jump from a very high building this coming New Year, demanding that the
current rulers of the world's most powerful and disingenuous regimes pledge an
immediate end to arms and towards a truthful commitment to non-violent conflict
resolution.

Laura forwarded this to me, and I'm still trying to piece out my reaction to this. I guess I feel an obligation to stop him, but nevermind that I don't know how I could stop him, I don't even know if this feeling is born from a genuine desire not to let this man hurt himself or from some socially-conditioned urge to condemn all attempts at self-injury. The latter feels closer to the truth, but it also feels disingenuous or, well, immoral. Is it callous to admit that I have no relation to this man other than a couple of heady hours in a police van and a police station, and therefore my first reaction to his suicide letter was concern for the other people who might be injured in his attempt? And do we have some unconditional duty to stop suicide if we believe it is imminent, or can we respect the autonomy of an adult who has decided that his life is no longer worth living?

My social conditioning has been so thorough that even asking these questions feels like depravity. I'm not really sure what to do.