The Wrongologist

The NYT had an article last Thursday about a suicide rescue on the George Washington Bridge by a bicyclist. Julio De Leon, 61, was biking home from work across the GW Bridge when he saw someone about the jump off the bridge and into the Hudson River. From the NYT:

Then he saw it: a dog in the pathway, tethered to a rail. “This is something unusual, and I looked to my left, and I saw the guy,” Mr. De Leon said.

More from the NYT:

The guy was a 19-year-old from Massachusetts. He had climbed over the rail that separates the path from the concrete ledge.

(Suicide attempts are common on the GWB. This year, eight people have leapt or fallen to their deaths. Another 40 times, passers-by or police officers have intervened. That’s a 20% “success” rate in jumping.)

Back to the story:

“In one second, only in a second, I just moved and grabbed like this”— his right arm curled like a shepherd’s crook — “and I keep him with me,” Mr. De Leon said. “He started to see reality. He was crying. I tried to calm him down.”

Great story. To this point.

It turns out another guy was crossing the bridge, and saw the person about to jump. He sprang into action by taking pictures with his cellphone. After Mr. De Leon grabbed the young man, the guy with the phone decided to become a co-rescuer. Together, he and Mr. De Leon pulled the distraught man over the railing, to the safety of the pathway.

As the NYT says:

It was striking that one man should have first taken a picture…before moving to help

After jointly hauling the potential suicide onto the bridge deck, De Leon asked the guy with the cell phone to call the police.

The guy was a cameraman before he decided to help with the rescue. It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have cameras in our pocket, or other digital technologies. To be honest, some of us were spectators even then. Remember Kitty Genovese?

But it wasn’t so long ago that people were reluctant to be photographed. Today, people take a pic and pass their phones back and forth, showing their friends the latest. The friends smile, and comment on what they are seeing. It is a new thing, and at the same time, a surprisingly traditional form of communicating, updated from when the roll of film in the camera was developed, and returned as photographs.

The question is has digital technology degraded our impulse act in a situation? Is our instinct now to observe and record? Let’s hope not.

There is no question that cell phone camera and video technology has improved transparency in our society. We need people to record injustice when they see it. Having a digital record of newsworthy events that the media haven’t or can’t get to is useful to the public.

Cat videos…not so much.

So, here is today’s Monday Wake-up call for all of us who exercise the camera in the phone before we ask ourselves: “Could I do something else in this situation that would be useful?”

Wake up voyeurs! To help with that, here is Suzanne Vega with “Left of Center”, her song from 1986 that was on the soundtrack of “Pretty in Pink”. That’s Joe Jackson on the piano. She sings:

 When they ask me
“What are you looking at?”
I always answer
“Nothing much” (not much)
I think they know that
I’m looking at them

Here is “Left of Center”:

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