This Suicide Awareness Month: Go Ahead; Politicize Suicide Prevention

Go ahead; politicize your fucking ass off. We do it every day. (Author selfie of author and author’s car.)

“Don’t politicize suicide prevention,” they say, while forcing LGBTQIA+ kids into the shadows and into the closet.

“Don’t politicize suicide prevention,” they say, while waving thin-blue-line flags one day, and busting cops’ heads at the U. S. Capitol the next.

“Don’t politicize suicide prevention,” they say, while there’s a youth mental health crisis and kids are afraid to go to school for fear of getting shot dead in their classrooms, and teachers are quitting in droves because of the same fear and because religious zealot school boards are banning books, whitewashing curricula, banning Pride flags and the word “gay” in public schools, and enforcing Draconian demagoguery wherever they can; chilling free speech and expression in environments where it’s supposed to flourish.

“Don’t politicize suicide prevention,” they say, in America, where there are (probably) more guns than people, and where just having a gun in your house triples not only your risk of dying by suicide, but the risk of every single person in that house. Where over 1/2 of all suicides use a firearm, where 2/3 of all American firearm deaths are suicides.

“Don’t politicize suicide prevention,” they say, while the bodies on the left and the bodies on the right pile up, and the numbers…