"Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."
UPDATE: The video. Interesting to see how it actually played out... compared to what I pictured.
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The police are the problem.
Everything goes fine until they arrive on the scene and stop all traffic.
Until then, people drive carefully around would-be jumpers or any severed heads on the roadway after an accident and are on their way.
It's gotten much worse since making a public nuisance of official duties has been elevated into a power grab.
This could be a job Americans are willing to do: Professional Bridge Jumpers Attendants. They can do photo layouts for relatives of those who do jump, and give each other heroism awards for each jumper they talk down. Special uniforms, lots of vacations and professional conferences in Las Vegas and high Pensions after 20 years are called for too. Happy days are here again. Three 8 hour shifts for 365 days for every bridge everywhere, no matter the size, will employ the autoworkers and the bankers again. If we run short of funding, we will borrow whatever we we need from the State of California.
(1) Mr. Lai served up a heaping helping of tough love, that’s for sure. Can you imagine the look on Mr. Chen’s face when he realized he was going over? His eyes must have bugged out like Roger Rabbit. Priceless. And we all learned a valuable lesson.
(2) Speaking of valuable lessons, I was too young when my father took me to see “Patton.”
He thought seeing it would teach me a valuable lesson about what it means to be a man.
Instead, I cried when the soldiers tossed the farmer’s donkey off the bridge and I thought the soldiers were all big jerko-meanies.
Lesson learned!
The Good Samaritan, updated.
The Greater Good.
s Frank Zappa once opined, "There is nothing worse than a suicide chump".
http://suomenkuvalehti.fi/kuvat/2009/05/23/china-suicide-help
He told police he wanted to kill himself because he was... in debt following a failed construction project, the China Daily reported.
"They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."
How is this different than the bailout culture being cultivated here?
We need our own Lai Jiansheng.
2009 - When we wanted our judges empathetic and our citizens...well, not so much.
Just another (bridge) partner who can no longer be trusted.
Note that Chen Fuchao was the twelfth "jumper" in the last 60 days to block traffic for hours . . . and the twelfth who didn't jump.
So there's a pattern of people causing traffic jams just to draw attention at this bridge, one that has been causing a traffic snarl more often than once every five days.
Around the twelfth time, I'd be tempted to push the moron off the bridge myself.
This happened to me in Seattle about 15 years ago. Someone jumped off a very low overpass onto I-5. Now the fall alone might have broken a leg, but what the jumper wanted was for an innocent driver to run him or her over. I was stuck on that freeway for more than 2 hours.
Why would a jumper be thinking: "I want to kill myself but only if I can ruin the life of someone I don't know too"? It's kind of an even crueller version of "suicide by cop".
How much of a fall off this bridge could this be, that the jumper lived, and is recovering?
Couldn't find the bridge height but here is some interesting bridge history. The last sentence seems appropriate:
Construction of the Haizhu Bridge, which is Guangzhou's first bridge spanning the Pearl River, began in December 1929 by the American contractor Markton Company, and was completed in February 1933. The bridge was damaged when Japanese troops attacked Guangzhou in 1938, and the opening and closing mechanisms on the central section of the bridge were irreparably damaged. The bridge was blown down by retreating
Guomindang troops on October 14, 1949 but rebuilt in 1950. In 1974, two slow-lane side bridges with pre-stressed reinforced concrete caissons were built.
With historic significance and a unique style, the Haizhu Bridge has been a lively sight in Guangzhou.
Pictures of the pushee and pusher with a salute by the pusher as the pushee does his Wile E. Coyote **poof** imitation.
And, of course, a Video
Levasseur - Why ask the questions you did when the BBC article had everything you asked about?
==============
Lai Jiansheng, 66, said he was fed up with the desperate man's "selfish activity" which caused huge traffic jams in Guangzhou, southern China.
He pushed, and Chen Fuchao fell 26ft (8m) on to an air cushion.
(suffering spine and wrist injury) .
-----------------
And Lai becomes an instant hero to anyone who has endured 2-8 hours of misery in gridlock because some pack of protestors or some nut has traffic blocked while police on OT pay in many cases are taking their own sweet leisurely time to end the situation.
I experienced 6 hours of gridlock in DC back a few years ago when some mentally ill guy put his tractor in mud near the Tidal Basin in DC...
"Our Heroes" decided he might just possibly have a bomb, CAN'T BE TOO CAUTIOUS!! -but then decided 'the safest course' was to "talk him weary enough to give up" - rather than act physical in any way.
This caused massive disruption to government and commerce in DC.
A colleague said that they should have just asked for an eager beaver cop volunteer to accept a one in a million chance that the tractor guy had a bomb..and just walk up and Taze his ass off the tractor after a half hour of this BS. And if no Taser was available, a shotgun waved in his face would have also saved nearly a million people from a day and a half of this crap.
(I think the 1st or second Mel Gibson "Lethal Weapon" movie had Mel's suicidal cop character walk up to a jumper and tell him that life really sucks and he ought to jump. In fact, Mel wanted to jump with him, because life really sucks for him, too. When the jumper showed signs of chickening out, Gibson's cop character grabbed him and hauled him down 6 stories off the roof. Onto an air bag, upon which the nutty, now seriously mentally traumatized jumper was screaming to other cops how insane the cop was. Ignored as other cops congratulated Gibson's cop character for risking his own life trying to save the poor jumper...)
That was Lethal Weapon (first one).
I think the guy in the tractor was from NC and had driven his tractor up there(on a trailer behind his Jeep) to protest federal farm policies (?) March 2003.
Wake up call, but it'd be different if the guy had died. Then instead of an indignant zen master representing the exterior world hitting his pupil across the back with a stick, he'd simply be a murderer.
Wake up call, but it'd be different if the guy had died. Then instead of an indignant zen master representing the exterior world hitting his pupil across the back with a stick, he'd simply be a murderer.
He'd still be a hero in my book. The "jumper" caused a five hour traffic jam. If you added up the five hours of lost time from everyone in that gridlock, you'd probably come up with a lifespan or two.
As Ben Franklin said, time is what life is made up of. I have no patience for people who waste my time to make a political point. Off he goes.
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