Today Is...Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc's Suicide

It is said that a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes a photograph doesn't need any words at all and unfortunately there are many which are too gruesome or gory to make it onto the news but that doesn't mean that the ones deemed worthy are not heart-breakingly awful and hard to look at.
Sometimes you see things you wish you could unsee and the ones which stick with me are the young Palestinian boy and his father cowered behind a small metal barrel as Israeli bullets rained around them seconds before they are both shot and killed.
The Napalm burned girl running down the road, the starving, dying Child in Sudan being stalked by a vulture waiting for her to die, the hanging of the teenage Serbian girl Lepa Radic by the Nazi's and the body of the lifeless refugee infant washed up on the shores of Greece are all horribly burned into my brain along with the photo of a Monk Thich Quang Duc, who sat down on a cushion at a busy Vietnamese crossroads, poured a can of petrol over himself and said a prayer before striking a match and dropping it on himself.
It was due to the rising rivalry between the Catholics and the Buddhists and witnesses state that the Monk didn't even move and remained absolutely still even while burning.
US President, John F. Kennedy, said of of the photograph: 'No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world' and the photographer, Malcolm Browne, described the scene he captured as: 'Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.'
President Kennedy, whose government was the main sponsor of the ruling regime who were persecuting Buddhists, saw the photo and threatened to publicly announce that it would no longer associate itself with the regime unless they stopped attacking Buddhist, they never and a U.S. backed coup later toppled the Government.
Photographs such as this allows the public to see situations they would otherwise be blind to and can make us angry, guilty and ashamed of what inhumanity us human's are capable of but they are important to change our worldview and make us think about the issues that matter in life.