Saturday, October 29, 2005
Durrrr...
Oh, no, death!!! By people who want to die, no less! We must stop these people from choosing what to do with their own life!!! That silly Golden Gate Bridge. Edward Guthmann is doing a seven part series on dead people who let physical reality catch up with emotional reality on the Golden Gate Bridge.
The conclusion is inescapable: A suicide barrier would prevent deaths.
Yeah, but what about the broader conclusion: Is preventing deaths a good idea in this case? I say no. Let 'em jump. Install automated guns or something to make sure they don't survive.
The Golden Gate Bridge is the world's No. 1 suicide magnet...
Eighty-seven percent are Bay Area residents -- exploding the myth that people flock from around the world to die here.
Gee... doesn't that also kind of explode your hypothesis of the GGB as a suicide magnet, too?
The first jumper, on Aug. 7, 1937, was Harold Wobber, a World War I veteran. Wobber turned to a stranger on the walkway -- saying, "This is as far as I go" -- and took his last step.
DING!!! DING!!! DING!!! Congratulations Harold Wobber, today's winner of the "Beetle Trailblazer Award"! And the story doesn't even make him look pathetic. All you folks who change your mind on the bridge could learn a lesson here.
Robert Blyther, a 27-year-old Navy veteran, flew from Virginia to San Francisco in December 1980 specifically to jump off the bridge to protest the election of Ronald Reagan as president.
Wait, I thought we exploded the myth that people come from around the... oh, forget it, consistency and sensationalism just don't mix. But again, all of you folks engaging in pathetic and useless protesting, more lessons to learn! You may as well do it in a way that doesn't inconvenience everyone else.
Filomeno De La Cruz, 33, celebrated Thanksgiving with relatives in 1993, then walked his 2-year-old son along the bridge. Around 5 p.m., De La Cruz lifted the child from his stroller, grasped him in his arms and jumped over the guardrail. "He was going through a divorce and custody fight," a homicide inspector said at the time.
Boo! Deduction for late-term abortion! You only get to kill yourself.
Weldon Kees, 40, was a poet and filmmaker who produced KPFA's radio show "Behind the Movie Camera." Kees parked his 1954 Plymouth Savoy at the bridge parking lot on July 18, 1955, left his keys in the ignition and disappeared. His body was never recovered.
But did anyone steal the car?
Fifty years later, Jonathan Zablotny, a senior at International High School, took his life. "Overall he had more reasons to be happy than to kill himself," wrote Zablotny's friend Patrick Fitzgerald in a letter to the bridge district board.
Oh, yeah, you'd know. Don't let the guy who actually knows what's going on in his head draw that conclusion.
"He told no one and left no note. All we know is that he left for school Tuesday morning and never got there. That afternoon he was dead."
Sounds like he didn't leave for school after all.
We like to feel good about where we live -- to believe that San Francisco retains its warmth and charitable heart. But the "cool, grey city of love" has for 68 years neglected an epidemic of death. Whereas officials at the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building and other suicide landmarks recognized a crisis and erected suicide barriers, the Golden Gate Bridge still offers a welcome mat to someone in search of a quick exit.
That's like neglecting an epidemic of people liking pink. Here, I'll spell this out for you folks. People who commit suicide choose to die. And the cool thing about the GGB, is that when they jump, they don't land on people or leave a huge mess to clean up, like Empire State Building jumpers. (I don't know the details of the landscape around the Eiffel Tower, but I'd imagine it's similar)
We sense the tragedy but view it in the abstract, rationalizing the deaths with a laissez-faire attitude: "They have a right to end their lives if they choose."
Ah, yes, the evil "laissez-faire attitude" of letting people do what they want. It's a free country, so we don't believe in such things. We're liberals. Give me a fucking break. There's no tragedy to sense, except the one some unconcerned asshole like Guthmann senses in order to make himself feel better about himself. "Oh, look, I'm so concerned with others. I want to protect them from themselves. I'm a better person than everyone else as a result." We feel that sincerity, Ed.
In the '90s, a suicide club was formed to predict the exact date that the 1,000th suicide would jump to his or her death. As the death toll approached, a local disc jockey promised a case of Snapple to the victim's family.
Now that's classy. But that gives me an idea. Maybe we should start handing out rewards to the family of suiciders. It'd be like paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel, but without the murder.
The railing is 4 feet high, and the parking lot is a short distance from the bridge. Within two to five minutes of parking one's car or getting off a bus, one can dive over the railing. No need to buy a gun or to stash pills; none of the bother of hanging or asphyxiation.
That's convenience that San Francsicans should be proud of. I used to live in a small town in Kansas. No tall buildings, no high bridges... unlike some folks, I can appreciate that convenience.
Says [suicide whiner Eve Meyer], "It's almost like saying, 'If you're a failure, you can always do this.'"
As opposed to saying "If you're a failure, you can always be a permanent drain on society without ever improving your position." Frankly, I think the suicide idea is better from all perspectives.
It's unclear when the plans were modified, but at some point architect Irving Morrow, originally hired to design the entryways and bridge plazas, went to work on the guardrails. Morrow reduced them to 4 feet, and in doing so created a stage for decades of self-slaughter.
DING!!! DING!!! DING!!! Congratulations Irving Morrow, today's winner of the "Beetle Philanthropy Award"!
Marissa Imrie was a straight-A student at Santa Rosa High School when she jumped off the bridge in December 2001. After her death, Marissa's mother, Renee Milligan, looked on her computer and found that Marissa had researched a Web site on suicide. She also had bought a book, Geo Stone's "Suicide and Attempted Suicide: Methods and Consequences," and learned that a jump from the bridge is far deadlier than suicide methods typically favored by women and girls: Poison is 15 percent effective; drug overdose, 12 percent; wrist cutting, 5 percent.
Thanks for passing on that information to future suiciders.
In January 1933, two classmates from a Tokyo school jumped into Mount Mihara, an active volcano on the Japanese island of Oshima. Weeks later, six more leaped into the volcano. Soon tourists were gathering to witness the suicides, which totaled 140 that year, 160 the next. Barriers were erected; it's no longer a suicide destination.
Aww...
"Various places develop a reputation as suicide landmarks," says suicidologist [Richard Seiden]. "Hanging trees and lovers' leaps and places like the Golden Gate Bridge start to get a notoriety. They develop a self-propelling momentum."
And it's good to know folks like Guthmann and Seiden are doing their best to keep that momentum alive. Speaking of which, I wonder if Seiden supports the suicide barrier. It seems if people stop killing themselves, he'd be out of a job. (Actually, he wouldn't, because he's retired. So maybe he does support it, so that he can put all of his successors out of a job, and not have to deal with challenges to his research)
Newspaper and media accounts are believed to contribute to the Werther effect, which is why The Chronicle stopped reporting each Golden Gate Bridge suicide more than 20 years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes said he went to the local media when the number approached 850. "We weaned them," Holmes said. But, he added, "the lack of publicity hasn't reduced the number of suicides at all."
I wonder if this paragraph strikes Guthmann as the slightest bit ironic.
In America, suicide is often disdained, just like the depression that triggers it, as a lack of moral fiber. "People think depression is like having lung cancer," says Stanford's Jose Maldonado. "'You did it to yourself. If you weren't so weak, you'd pull yourself up by your bootstraps.'"
Just like having lung cancer? Don't a lot of people get lung cancer for reasons other than smoking?
Anyway, here is something that definitely needs to change. As a society, we need to start celebrating suicide as an simple automatic thinning mechanism for the useless depressed people of the world. It needs to be seen as a bold statement that, instead of just sucking up air, an individual decided to spare everyone else her whining and moaning and depression. It needs to become the considerate thing to do, while clinging to life needs to be seen as selfish.
For a personality in crisis, the accessibility of the Golden Gate Bridge can be the tipping point between life and death. "It's like leaving a row of bottles of poison in front of a baby," says Meyer of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. "And they're all pretty and have bows on them."
Geez, Meyer is just full of great ideas.
The majority of bridge suicides are preventable, she says, because so many are impulsive. Strangely, the greatest stumbling block in the building of a suicide barrier is the attitude of a population that prides itself on open-mindedness.
"I had someone come up to me as I was walking to some hearings and he said, 'They should put up a diving board so those people can jump off it.' I said, 'Now say to me, "They should put up a diving board so my son could jump off of it."'"
DING!!! DING!!! DING!!! Congratulations, Edward Guthmann, today's winner of the "Beetle Unusual Writing Award" for a triple-nested quotation.
I don't quite see how putting a diving board up would make jumping easier.
By the way, the majority of acts of kindness are preventable, because so many are impulsive. We should do something about those, too.
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