Cautionary Tale - Be Careful Out There!

[bmattock]

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=traffic&id=4032746

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/404015p-342073c.html

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/66154.htm

This is not an attack on the police, or the NYPD. The officer who, is a housing officer with the NYPD, is accused of driving drunk and hitting and killing a photographer on the 59th Street Bridge at 3:30 this morning as he drove on a closed section of the bridge. Neither he nor the photographer should have been where they were at that time, since that section of the bridge was closed. A tragedy all around.

Note: I don't know the truth of it, obviously, but the NY Post (a notorious sensationalist paper) states that the cop, after hitting the photographer, backed up and ran him over a second time.

However, it is apparent from the story that NY takes DUI far more seriously than many parts of the USA. In some states, it is very little more than an expensive fine and a suspended license if you kill someone while driving drunk. In NY, it appears that people who kill people while driving drunk do hard prison time.

On a personal note, I was shooting on a bridge in Albuquerque several years ago and some of the cars driving by were honking and swerving, the drivers obviously enjoying startling me as I tried to get some shots of the railyard that was under the bridge. One car drove by and the passenger hurled his full fast-food soda cup at me. Didn't hit me, but splashed me with sticky soda. Had I fallen over the side of the bridge, I'd have been killed, it was too high to survive such a fall. People can be odd sometimes.

So be careful out there.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[Socke]

Yeah! People suck!

 

[bmattock]

Yeah! People suck!

Well, they certainly can at times. I have always been somewhat amazed at the behavior that people will get up to when they are either anonymous or in a crowd - things they would never think of doing if alone. What person would intentionally swerve towards a photographer on a bridge, honking and laughing as the guy jumped and nearly fell off? One-on-one, probably very very few are that outright evil to actually try to kill someone. But taken in a crowd, well, I saw about ten cars do the same thing to me in the space of a couple of minutes - I finally abandoned the bridge shot as a bad job and moved on. I'm sure that if you had asked them, they'd have said they never meant to hurt anyone, let alone murder them. Yet if I had fallen as a result of their actions, that's exactly what it would have been.

Why, when a person is standing on a ledge of a tall building, threatening to kill themselves, does the crowd chant "Jump, jump!" Do they individually want to kill another human being? Do they think to themselves, "That guy died because I yelled at him to jump until he did it?" I doubt that.

Remember the news story about the teenage kids who beat and killed the homeless people in Florida recently? I doubt that any one of them would ever have decided to go on a murderous rampage all by themselves, without their friends to back them up and egg each other on.

Yeah, sometimes people do suck. What a shame.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[BrianShaw]

Yeah! People suck!

I say this all the time. I always thought it was an original saying... but now I see that my saying is internationally recognized. 😀

I alternate saying that with "It sucks to be a people." Okay, the grammar is bad, but you get the point.

 

[dazedgonebye]

I like to shoot roadside memorials when I can, but I've passed by more than I've shot because I did not want to end up with my own cross next to the subject.
It's just not safe no the side of the road...crazy people or not.

 

[enochRoot]

I say this all the time. I always thought it was an original saying... but now I see that my saying is internationally recognized. 😀

I alternate saying that with "It sucks to be a people." Okay, the grammar is bad, but you get the point.

well...you *do* live in the ultimate city of sucky people too! that doesn't hurt 😀

my own personal version goes: "people suck, but individuals are alright". it kind of goes in line w/ what bill was saying. other favorite sayings of mine are "i hate people", "the world is going to hell", etc 😎 funny thing is...i'm not anti-social. a couple of lines from "clerks" sums it up best:

Dante - You hate people!
Randal - But, I love gatherings, isn't it ironic?