The 130ft high bridge where a young woman was hurled to her death on a bungled rope jump is to be blown up to prevent future tragedies, the Daily Mail can reveal.
The bridge didn’t cause her death, humans did. Still, I guess there’s precedent….
Work started Wednesday morning, less than a week after 21-year-old Brazilian Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas was hurled off the bridge to her death. The decision to demolish the dangerous structure comes after a heartbroken relative demanded action in a text to a local politician who for years has campaigned against the rogue cord and bungee operators using it.
I don’t know for certain, but if I’d been that grieving relative, I’d have wanted the law to focus on the people who failed her and not on the structure.
‘In ancient history, destroying or abandoning structures after a death was a common ritual used to achieve ritual purification, prevent the deceased's spirit from lingering, or erase a disgraceful legacy.’
ReplyDeleteThe Encyclopaedia Britannica, complacent in its modernity, appears not to have noticed that the Enlightenment was not necessarily a one-way and universal process and that superstition is indeed still alive and kicking, as your precedents show.
It is also potentially turbocharged by mass communication and social media; if the veneer of rationalism is so frighteningly thin, we could yet see a 21st century version of the witch-hunts of 16th century Britain and America (and any era in tribal Africa) or, more pertinently, the scapegoating of Jews for natural disasters in the Middle Ages fuelled by online hysteria and coordinated via the internet.
Mac, we are already seeing 21st century versions of witch-hunts. Today’s woke witches being the hunters and ordinary people like us being the hunted.
DeleteAgreed, Anon, although so far things have generally stopped short of actual bodily harm, sadly a common feature of all my examples (I exclude - but don’t by any means belittle - the suffering of those hounded out of their jobs and worse).
ReplyDeleteAs for woke witches doing the hunting - which fits well with their reliance on spells and incantations to demonstrate their adherence to the mob - I am still reeling from reading an online sample essay on ‘The Crucible’ which portrayed Abigail Wiliams as the heroine, a victim of the patriarchy and the ‘bigoted’, townsfolk of Salem (who must, in any case, be in the wrong because they keep African slaves and condemn Tituba’s tribal religious practices).
A society capable of interpreting Miller’s play in that light is one arguably beyond redemption.
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