A Brief Comment on the Death of Mike Ruppert by Self-inflicted Gunshot Wound:

By Jenna Orkin

   We always knew it could come to this. 

   To write about Mike requires the tranquility of recollection but at the moment, all is turmoil. 

Mike, you told us, "Evolve or perish."  Yet in Apocalypse Man you merged them, speaking of death as the ultimate evolution.  One day we'll all find out whether that is, in fact, the case but it's not the message you used to impart!

   Among the emails that cascaded in last night is a wonderful link which is sorely needed at such a time: Hope and Courage.  Accompanying it, the following quote from Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List:

"Where's the electric fence?" Clara asked the woman.  To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires.   The answer the woman gave was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a
balance, a perversely sane core.

"Don't kill yourself on the fence, Clara," the woman urged her.  "If you do that, you'll never know what happened to you."

It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide.   Kill yourself and you'll never find out how the plot ends.   Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot.  But somehow the answer was adequate.  She turned around.  When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she'd set out to look for the fence.  But her Cracow friend had -- by her reply -- somehow cut her off from suicide as an option.