The 13-hour stand-off on the Bay Bridge has the op/ed writers churning out reams of material chock full of moral and ethical questions. It seems that most folks have polarized into two groups. One feels that a human life is important enough to warrant any and all measures to preserve it. The other camp thinks a potential jumper should be given a set amount of time to bellyache and bask in the public's attention, after which a SWAT team takes them down.
Can you guess which direction my feelings lie?
If you guess that I think such stand-offs should be ended quickly with a round of .40 S&W, you'd be right. The authorities can fish the bloated corpse out of the bay sometime later, if at all. The deliberate actions of a single individual, be they a suicidal loser or a famous loser like Woody Harrelson, cannot be allowed to paralyze a city.
A San Francisco Chronicle writer no doubt felt she was crafting a biting analogy when she observed that no expense or resource would be spared to save a single construction worker dangling from a crane. To me, this comparison has absolutely no merit. The construction worker has decided to do dangerous work and so, like the suicidal dork, has made a decision to put his life at risk. The situations diverge greatly from here for me.
The construction worker does not hold sole responsibility for their precarious circumstance. Maybe the manufacturer of the worker's safety harness didn't properly treat it against UV exposure. Maybe a coworker didn't repair a guard rail correctly. Whatever the reason, the construction worker did not make a conscious decision to put their life in imminent and immediate peril. On the other hand, the suicidal dork drove out to the bridge, parked his car, and stepped over the railing, all very deliberate actions for which it would take a bit of legal tap dancing and a plea of insanity to relinquish responsibility.
Also, the dangling construction worker has very little control over the outcome of their situation. Otherwise, they wouldn't need such an expensive and dramatic rescue. The suicidal loser needs merely to step away from the edge of the bridge/office building/Eiffel Tower observation deck.
So I would say that a suicidal freak brandishing a box cutter at police officers has very little in common with a construction working hanging from a crane. I would gladly wait in traffic if it helped the construction worker.
Another tack taken by the idealists is to tally up all the estimates of dollars lost while motorists idle on the bridge and decry the crass pragmatism of the exercise. "How can you possibly put a price on a human life?" they ask incredulously. Very easily, I say.
I spend too many hours at work. In exchange, the numbers in my bank account go up periodically. I trade my life and talent for cash. It's the way the system works, so far. A CEO trades her life and ability for 500 times more cash than I do. Here the system starts to break down a bit in some people's regard. But if I wasn't working for cash, I'd be working for barter or trading my sweat and pain for crops to keep my family fed. If an individual blocked passage of my township's yearly shipment of seed grain, potentially imperiling the lives of an entire population, I'd be the first to pitchfork the fool out of the way. It's only because the costs are distributed so widely and absorbed by the civic nature of the services and structures involved that people are able to write so sanctimoniously about the cost of saving one suicidal idiot.
In fact, a price is already being placed on human life on a regular basis. Wilderness rescue involves folks who, through bad luck or bad planning, find themselves in a life threatening situation. As more and more non-Boy-Scout, urban hipster, wannabe Crocodile Dundees head out into the bush with their heads in their rectums, many rescue organizations have begun to charge a hefty fee for services rendered. They will save your life, but it isn't going to be cheap. Luckily, they don't ask for cash up front, yet. If you're lucky, you can get a helicopter ride from everyone's favorite misanthropic recluse superstar, Harrison Ford.
Another point made by the Chronicle writer is that folks in the area refused to pay for a suicide barrier on the new Bay Bridge because it would obstruct the view. This is supposed to be hypocritical and callous. We value our view of the bay more than a human life. We don't want to pay for the barrier, yet we also don't want to pay to save the suicide's life. Where's the problem with this equation? I'm already paying enough as it is for positive things like building codes, design reviews, and inspections, designed to prevent folks from accidentally dying. If someone wants to commit suicide, there are a zillion less spectacular, sensational, expensive, and generally disruptive ways to do it.
On a less economic but just as pragmatic note, each of us only has so much time to live. I speak for everyone else, but I'd really like to stick around for as long as possible. On this point, I'm not indecisive. I think it's safe to assume that the thousands of folks inconvenienced by the suicidal moron were not suicidal themselves. So this one person ambivalent about continuing to breathe spent 13 hours freaking out, meanwhile stealing tens of thousands of hours from those folks wasting their lives waiting for one complete loser to decide to shit or get off the pot.
It's just wrong.
Pakeha