Man commits suicide at ground zero, reportedly distraught over Bush's re-election

Veal's mother said her son was upset about the result of the presidential election and had driven to New York, Gus Danese, president of the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association, said in an interview published Sunday in the New York Times.

Friends said Veal worked in a computer lab at the University of Georgia and was planning to marry.

"I'm absolutely sure it's a protest," Mary Anne Mauney, Veal's supervisor at the lab, told the New York Daily News. "I don't know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic."

Police were investigating how Veal entered the former World Trade Center site, which is protected by high fences and owned by the Port Authority.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/041107/w110720.html

WASHINGTON: Georgia resident Andrew Veal travelled to New York after the presidential elections, went to Ground Zero of 9/11, and shot himself in the head with a .12-gauge shotgun.

His family and friends told city police that 25-year-old Veal, a registered Democrat who worked for the University of Georgia, was despondent over the results.

Veal's suicide is the most extreme reaction reported in the US to president Bush's winning in what is being described as one of the most bitter and divisive elections in history. But accounts across the country, particularly from the liberal bastions on the East Coast and West Coast, suggest that many Democrats are traumatised by the results.

Therapists are reporting an upsurge in patients seeking counselling for depression over political events of last week.

Psychologists and anger specialists are treating what they call "political rage" problems. There are no immediate numbers attached to this Democratic despair but newspapers in New York and California have reported the issue.

While some have taken the defeat in good humour, forwarding even more jokes about Bush and talking about seeking asylum abroad, others are venting on the Internet, in blogs, chatrooms and on e-mail.

One e-mail forwarded to this paper with the subject line "Depressed" read: "This is what I got from the election results: more than a simple majority of Americans are in favour of war, gender inequity, racial and ethnic inequity and intolerance, religious intolerance, tax breaks for the filthy rich, utter disregard for the environment... Six years ago people got their self-righteous panties in a wad because Clinton screwed an intern. Bush f***s an entire nation and they re-elect him."

"I am ashamed to be an American this week,'' the e-mail raged on. "The entire world witnessed a moronic mass of people re-elect an inarticulate addle-pated twit. We are a joke.''

While a satirical website http://www.marryanamerican.ca popped up from Canada seeking to rescue liberal Americans through matrimony, Canada's ministry of immigration and citizenship reported, in all seriousness, a record-shattering jump in the number of visits to its website - http://www.cic.gc.ca - on the day after last week's election.

The average number of visitors to the site on any given day hovers around 65,000, with about 20,000 of those daily visits come from the US. But last Wednesday, the number of visits to the site more than doubled to around 179,000, with 115,000 hits coming from south of the border, ministry officials disclosed.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-915161,curpg-2.cms