In a remarkable move confirming the Tappan Zee bridge in New York is a perfect suicide machine — over the last decade more than 25 people have leapt 138 feet in the air to find death in the Hudson River below — the New York State Thruway Authority installed “suicide prevention phones” on each side of the bridge.
The worst sort of dying is an unintentional death delivered in a dumb act. Meet the sad lesson of Jon-Erik Hexum.
On March 15, 2005 on a farm in Venango, Nebraska, 14-year-old Brandenn Bremmer — Gifted and promising — held a .22 caliber varmint rifle to his head and pulled the trigger. He didn’t die immediately. When his parents found him he was still breathing. Brandenn’s body was airlifted to Denver, Colorado where his organs were harvested over the next two days.
In Dan Gookin’s Wambooli email update yesterday he let loose a warning about the danger of Huffing with Dust-Off and how inhaling Dust-Off to get a high can lead to death.
Dust-Off is a compressed air product that used to be mainly used to blow away grit and dust from film negatives. Today you use mainly Dust-Off to blow away grit and dust from computers. The Dust-Off danger is real and not new.
The recent group suicide of the Heaven’s Gate community is quite a fascinating and vivid example of the power of Faith in the Greater Glory of a Higher Calling. It doesn’t matter if you support how Heaven’s Gate chose to express their Faith – their action is a curious study of a group’s dynamic ability to move beyond the physical world and reach out to touch something greater than themselves.
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