Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an undo button

[mbarker]

One of the news items today here in Japan was rather sad. Apparently a young man died because the rest of the group he was with teased him into jumping or diving. 8 meters (roughly 24 feet) into water that was roughly 4 meters deep. I'm not sure from the news report whether he hit the side going down or simply didn't know how to dive. This was not a diving spot, really. Just a high stone wall along a river bank, with a deep spot below.

The news made it fairly plain that he apparently didn't want to do this, but the other eight people that he was out with made fun of him until he jumped. I suspect most of them are now wondering why it was so important to get him to jump. It wasn't clear from the news whether others in the group also were diving or not. Doesn't really matter, of course.

I have to admit when I first heard the news I expected that he would be a teenager or perhaps college-age. However, he was 33 years old. I guess his mother hadn't spent enough time telling him, "It doesn't matter if everyone else is being stupid, you don't have to."

Comments

[dialyn.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this but I've no clue what the answer is. There have been so many incidents lately where a mob gets together to destroy property or attack people, and they seem to be doing these things for no better reason than they were joining in on someone else's bad idea. I don't know why a 33-year-old man couldn't resist being pushed to do something so clearly dangerous or why the crowd thought it necessary to push him toward his death. Franky, I don't understand the hive mentality people seem to be so fond of these days. There's something so desperately tragic about this on so many levels.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is that so often people have never really been taught that there might be a higher morality or rule than "everybody's doing it." It's one thing that most of the religions were actually pretty good about -- teaching that there is a higher rule of some kind and that following it may be hard. It is tragic.