We got ’em by the truckload up here
A bridge over Seattle is becoming hazardous to the mental health of the dot-com employees and other office workers below, who keep seeing people jump to their deaths from the span.
Thirty-nine people over the past decade have committed suicide off the 155-foot-high Aurora Bridge _ eight in 2006 alone _ and counselors are regularly brought in to help office workers deal with the shock of seeing the leap or the bloody aftermath.
At least one woman, Sarah Edwards, drives on the left side of the street near her office ever since a body landed on the hood of a co-worker’s car.
City and state officials, meanwhile, are adding suicide-prevention signs and telephones in hopes of reducing the death toll.
The “suicide bridge,” as the half-mile span has been occasionally called since it was built in 1931, carries as many as 45,000 vehicles a day on one of the main north-south highways through Seattle, passing over a narrow channel connecting Lake Washington and Lake Union.
Some jumpers hit the water; others land on the pavement or other solid ground. Either way, they almost always die. (One person is said to have survived after landing in the water.)
The neighborhood beneath the bridge used to be docks and warehouses, and the suicides went largely unnoticed. But during the technology boom of the past two decades, it morphed into a trendy area full of office buildings, shops and restaurants, and the bodies began to fall where people could see them.
You can tell that the City of Seattle doesn’t care about the suicidal or the people who either work or reside under this bridge because they haven’t suspended a net long either side of it’s length.
Think about it; The city is run by uber-liberals and even psuedo liberals want everyone to have a “safety net”, health care safety net, welfare safety net, transportation safety net, retirement safety net, etc.
Suicides in Seattle? You’ve got to be kidding. That ultra-liberal mecca. The people’s republic of the northwest. Why would anyone want to committ suicide in that worker’s paradise?
I saw this report on the news, and they were saying if they strung a safety net under the bridge it would cause drag making the bridge structurally unsound. Something about that doesn’t sound right to me.
And of course the city of Seattle doesn’t care about the people bothered by this. They’re capitalists with paying jobs, so they don’t matter any more than the amount of taxes they pay. But those who commit suicide, they have to respect their choice and keep the guard-rails of the bridge low enough to enable them to choose to end their lives or not. We can’t strip suffering people of their right to end their lives by making the bridge tougher to committ suicide upon.