An American landmark began getting uglier last week, as construction began on a giant suicide net for the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge is an icon of industrial beauty. It’s a tremendous engineering accomplishment—long the longest suspension bridge in the world, and 220 feet above the water at high tide. Frequently, people who want to kill themselves jump off it.
Adding a suicide net is stupid for a half dozen reasons. First, the natural rights of life, liberty and property all give free men the right to kill themselves if they so choose. Lots of conservatives object to suicide on moral grounds—I object to suicide too—but that doesn’t mean it should be illegal. Freedom means people are free to do things that are morally objectionable so long as they don’t interfere with anyone else’s rights. I imagine that the only way jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge interferes with the rights of others is by creating traffic jams.
The practical reasons are more persuasive. People who want to commit suicide actually have other options beside the Golden Gate Bridge. Last year, about 45,000 Americans committed suicide; about 4,300 of them in California. Last year, 39 people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Which is a lot, in terms of lives lost, but a tiny proportion of suicides en masse. Specially: A little less than 9 hundredths of one percent of total American suicides.
And yet, the Golden Gate suicide net is going to cost, according to CBS News, “just over $200 million drawn from a mix of federal, state and local sources.” One can’t help but think that 200 million dollars could save more than about 40 lives a year if it were spent on something else. Medical research. IED detection. Motorcycle helmets. Et cetera.
And remember, we’re not talking simply about saving lives—we’re talking about preventing people from killing themselves. People who are dying of their own volition, in accordance with their right to do so, as opposed to, say, people with degenerative diseases. (The exceptions to this, of course, are cases where suicide is a depressive compulsion—which I would argue are not strictly suicides, but rather deaths from fatal illness). We’re also talking about people who, if they choose to kill themselves, can jump off a cliff at either end of the bridge, or walk into San Francisco bay. The British Medical Journal did a study to determine if suicide barriers actually prevented suicides, by studying the effects of a new, and very ugly, suicide fence built on a bridge in Toronto. They concluded that, “although the barrier prevented suicides at Bloor Street Viaduct, the rate of suicide by jumping in Toronto remained unchanged. This lack of change might have been due to a reciprocal increase in suicides from other bridges and buildings.”
The final reason is what will rankle most: This suicide net will take one of the most beautiful objects in the world and make it less beautiful, because of the emotional, illogical reaction of politicians. Nancy Pelosi attended the ceremony to inaugurate construction last week, and said people ask her, isn’t two-hundred-million dollars “a lot of money for a net? And we would say no, it’s not a lot of money for a life, for all those lives.”
If the net lasts 50 years and stops 40 suicides a year, each suicide prevented will have cost $100,000. Mrs. Pelosi should, I suggest, be thinking of how many people will be killed by spending this money on so inefficient a method of saving lives (if indeed one can quantity these things in the way she evidently has).
Unfortunately, this is the same illogical disregard for beauty and common sense that has blighted landmarks all over the country. No bridge or skyscraper needs a suicide fence, or truly benefits from one, but they’re painfully common. No pretty country road needs a warning sign every 10 yards: “No passing,” though road-paint already indicates no passing; “deer crossing,” when deers are ubiquitous; curvy road signs on roads that are manifestly curvy, road work signs on roads where there’s no road work, “Scenic Road” signs on roads that would be scenic if not for all the damned signs.
European cars have become much uglier, in an effort to make them safer, for pedestrians, per an EU diktat. I imagine that’s the next step for us too. What politician has the courage to say that we can’t live in a gauze-wrapped society, that sometimes people die in accidents, and that art and beauty (and freedom) are worth considering in safety calculations?
The first step is getting someone to the top of the Empire State Building to say “tear down this fence.” But I won’t hold my breath.
