You thought 12 grand to paint a blue line was crazy; how about a million bucks for a guard rail?It sounds nuts, but there was already excessive back patting in May of 2006 when the Mental Health Association of Santa Barbara and the county Search and Rescue publicly endorsed a CalTrans committee's plans to install a suicide prevention barrier along both sides of the Cold Spring Canyon Arch Bridge. Right off the bat the issue generated controversy. Thanks to the bureaucracy of entities such as CalTrans, these types of things take alot of time to flesh out. Here we are 18 months later and the debate is finally getting some serious media play. A group calling itself Friends of the Bridge has submitted an alternative proposal to CalTrans, forcing them to consider something other than a million dollar barricade. CalTrans being a public entity, by law it must review all measures proposed to it before it makes its determination about how to use the one million dollars that has already been allocated for a "traffic safety improvement project" on or around the bridge. Let the battle begin!
The Friends of the Bridge, mouthpieced by a man named Marc McGinnes, released their proposal last week countering the original CalTrans plan, forcing it into a review process that could take months, if not years. McGinnes is a retired UCSB Environmental Studies Senior Lecturer Emeritus with loose ties to the author of a study published in October of 2007, Garret Glasgow. Glasgow argued in his study against the barriers, placing him in the same camp as the Allies of the Arch, but for different reasons. Both McGinnes and Glasgow have been slammed in the local blogs this past week, the former for his insensitivity to victims of suicide and the latter for publishing a non-commissioned study that has yet to garner any peer review. The Supporters of the Span seem to have an aesthetic motivation against the barriers. Arguing that the bridge affords the best views of the Santa Ynez Valley that the County enjoys, they believe that installing a million buck balustrade will ruin the panorama that none of us should be enjoying as we drive across that overpass (safety first!). Glasgow argues that rails do not deter suicides, that other methods of suicide prevention are more effective and much cheaper, and the cost does not justify deterring what amounts to an average of one suicide attempt by high dive per year.
Of course my opinion of the situation is that everybody involved is (ahem) jumping to conclusions.
I know it was a long time ago but maybe my readers can enlighten me: when exactly did America decide that it knew best when an individual should depart this planet? I can tie in religion, Jack Kevorkian, Aaron Burr, and the War on Terror here but I'll spare you because I can simplify. I believe in an individuals right to choose. Whether it's a terminal cancer patient in severe pain or a guy who can't get over the fact that his girlfriend is banging his best friend, who am I to say that the individual has no right to expedite his quest to see what's on the other side of mortality? Why does the government have the right to legislate and allocate the ideology of self-immolation? Unless that suicide is a murder-suicide, as in the case of the 19 hijackers or the roided up wrestler, we would be better served to allow these people to exercise their free will to take their leap of faith, slash their wrists in the bathtub, or gobble a bottle of tranquilizers. The federal money granted to mental health associations could be used for so many other reasons than to anesthetize errrrr rehabilitate people that just want to check out early. Population control is a weak argument for allowing suicide to be legal in that the frequency of suicide related deaths is so low, but it doesn't hurt the overall assertion that we've already got too many unstable people on the planet. Factor in the inevitability of a CalTrans project going over time and way over budget, and the initial proposal is even more worthy of euthanization.
Given the choice between a million dollars for an idea that may not even work, or a couple hundred bucks for a few National Forest guys with some shovels and some trash bags to visit the bottom of the ravine once a year, which would you choose? I'll take the Park Rangers. If this kind of cradle to the grave oversight by the government gets passed, then what is the next logical step? Will we stake police out by the train tracks to stop drug addled homeless guys from jumping in front of the Amtrak? Let's just repeal the Second Amendment now so we can stop the throngs of people who decide that Bud Dwyer is their idol, and while we're at it we can officially censor out the end of The Shawshank Redemption when the warden eats a bullet.
The people that believe the government should control when and how you die are the same hypocrites that cry and whine about The Patriot Act infringing upon their civil liberties. That's why Schopenhauer and Hume would never be members of the ACLU. But if the proponents of the parapet get their way, CalTrans' next steps might be to roll back the speed limits on the 101 to 25 m.p.h., or to legislate penalties for Starbucks intake inside of a moving vehicle.
Hopefully the powers that be will do the only right thing to do in this situation: nothing.
