Flowers Fail to Ameliorate New Prison-Style Bridge Fences
In response to the three suicides in Cornell’s gorges this semester, Cornell has erected giant, wire-topped metal fences on all of the bridges. While the fences cannot protect against determined, pre-meditated suicides, they are supposed to discourage “impulse suicides”—that is, a spontaneous decision to throw oneself off of our readily available bridges.
The problem is, we’ll never really know whether they actually prevent someone from taking the fatal plunge. In the meantime—the fences are a “temporary” solution designed to last about 18 months—they’re just ugly. As one of my classmates put it the other day, “I feel like I’m in a concentration camp.” If anything, they serve as a constant reminder of the recent tragedies. And the flowers that people have been stringing through the chainlink (above) do little to lighten the mood.
April 1st, 2010 at 10:00 pm
wow.. those flowers really helped in making the fences look nicer!: ) I hope that there would be less people committing suicides…