I get your point, but I’d qualify: empathy is the ability to understand how she got there. Sympathy is coddling her disregard for her own personal safety and and indulging and validating her decision to be lazy to the point of abject stupidity.
Its like talking to someone while holding a lit match… and burning your fingers. Sure, you curse, but in retrospect stupidity Should hurt (at least a little). Its how we learn some of life’s most basic lessons.
Do I think she was humiliated? Yes.
Do I think she’ll do it again? No.
Its a simplistic argument, but should we really spend our lives walking after people to remind them, “Stove…? Hot! Stove…!? Hot!” ?
I have done a 30 meter dive, so to me 22 feet, feet first into unknown depth water would be doable, though I would be worried about breaking legs and compression fractures in the spine - but that is a valid choice if you know it is only 22 feet. She may have thought it was much higher, or panic at the unknown could have kept her frozen.
I just don’t see what’s funny about someone being caught in a terrifying situation. There’s no element of irony, like if it happened to a bridge safety inspector. There’s no element of comeuppance, like if she got stuck while trying to fling an innocent bystander off a bridge. It’s just some drunk or dimwitted older lady ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Would it be funny if it was your absent-minded mom or grandma? A developmentally-disabled person who couldn’t read a sign?
To laugh at people’s frailties is fundamentally mean-spirited.
That show “Ow! My balls!” should be out anytime now, set your DVRs, folks.
It is not a pedestrian bridge and it takes a fair grade of don’t-care to cross a rail bridge (or a traffic bridge with no sidewalks). It seems to be developing that this bridge is more unsafe than it needs to be because of long-distance remote control and insufficient warnings or monitoring, but she had no right (literally) to be on the bridge in the first place.
I’m more concerned about the two who were recently killed on the bridge in the same situation. There is clearly something wrong with the setup that I blame squarely on the world of the wonderful low-tax South’ren mindset. (We all pay the same taxes, in the end; I’ll pay mine in cash and not in risk, poor education or low quality of life. Or by having a bridge kill the unwary in gruesome ways because the regulatory agency is minimal.)
Well, that is kind of the world we live in. If we stopped putting warnings on everything, we’d start reducing the population of people who think a plastic bag is a fine toy to give a kid to play with.
If it were my mom up there, I would be sick to my stomach with terror while she was in danger. Once she was down, I would never, ever stop laughing at her. My last words to her on her deathbed would likely be, “At least there’s no drawbridges around here.”
In fairness, if I were the one stuck up there, she would have the same reaction. Heck, if I were the one stuck up there, I’d have the same reaction.
The woman wasn’t hurt. She was scared for a little bit, then she was perfectly okay. I don’t think it makes someone an inhuman monster to find some humor in that situation.
I’m kind of surprised your familiar with Idiocracy, given that the entire point of the movie is to laugh at retarded people.
If it happened to someone I knew, there could be post facto humor to be had, but knowing nothing but this about the person, what is the source of the comedy? It’s not “Grandma always told me not to do dumb stuff, but look at the predicament she got herself into, ha ha!” and it’s not teasing the person and laughing about their foibles. It’s not even your bitchy co-worker or the neighbor whose dog always poops on your lawn.
We have no idea whether the woman is “perfectly okay” or how mentally equipped she is to deal with the situation; we just know that she was terrified and that she didn’t fall off the bridge and die. She obviously may be a bit out of it in general or she probably wouldn’t have ended up in the situation. When I think of an older lady clinging to a bridge in legitimate terror for her life, it just doesn’t seem even slightly funny.
“Idiocracy” is social commentary, not just a chance to laugh at people, plus, it is fiction. This is a real person. She is somewhere right now, trying to live her life, a life that is probably very much worse than it was before this incident that caused her to become the subject of international mockery. Yes, she did something dumb. Maybe she is a superdumb person who wears ugly clothes and shouldn’t be on railroad bridges and walks in stupid breast cancer events and looks like a stupid Jesus Christ scarecrow. Ha ha ha.
She looks kinda funny up there, is all. It’s not exactly a deep concept.
Wow, you’re just jumping right to, “She’s clearly too stupid to be treated like a normal person,” just based off this one story?
I suppose that might be true, but I’m not really seeing the evidence for it. She did something stupid (walking on the railroad bridge) and got a scare and maybe a bit of wounded pride out of it. This isn’t a tragedy. No one was harmed. No property was damaged. A woman had a bad afternoon, and then was fine.
Well, the value of Idiocracy as social commentary is best left for another thread.
“Probably?” That’s a pretty bold assumption, and is predicated on the idea that this woman is exceptionally emotionally fragile, or actually mentally impaired. Which is pretty patronizing. I mean, I don’t know anything about this person, other than she was stuck up on a bridge for less than half an hour. But if I imagine if I had been in her position - you know, using empathy? - and then found this thread, the only posts here that would genuinely bother me are yours.
You did notice that the thread links to an article in the Daily Mail, right? I also saw the pictures and story today on other “new” sites. Her photo is literally plastered all over international new sources, this thread is not the issue. I don’t think someone would have to be “exceptionally emotionally fragile” to be upset about being humiliated worldwide and having strangers criticize your mental state, outfit, position, etc.
There is nothing patronizing about thinking someone may have an impairment of some sort and that their self-imposed life-threatening plight isn’t funny.
And how have I said she is “clearly too stupid to be treated like a normal person”? Her “stupidity” has been cited as justification for thinking it’s funny. I don’t think it’s funny regardless of her intelligence level on this or any other occasion. I just think it’s extra-unfunny if she is handicapped in some way.
I do. Everyone does something dumb in their lives, from time to time. If you can’t laugh about it, it probably means you’re a bit of a prick.
I’m going to assume, without evidence to the contrary, that this woman isn’t a prick.
Well, you’re wrong. Glad I could clear that up for you.
On the other hand, if it turns out she’s a neo-Nazi, it makes the story even better. However, since we do not have any evidence that she’s either mentally handicapped, or a fascist, it’s kind of dumb to react to the story as if she were.
That’s because it’s only that one side of the bridge that goes up, it’s not like most typical draw bridges that open in the center of the expanse by raising both sides.
Your first sentence is very accurate, but the rest goes downhill quite quickly from there. But I can see how you might jump to a lot of those inaccurate conclusions if you’re unfamiliar with the area in general and the bridge in particular.
First of all, and most significantly, the default position of the bridge is UP. It’s a relatively low-traffic stretch of train track, but it’s *quite *a busy waterway. The river traffic there is mostly comprised of pleasure boaters in their expensive boats going to and from the various quite expensive marinas – or their much more expensive waterfront homes – and the Atlantic Ocean. The area on land is smack dab in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, in the area where a lot of bars, clubs, restaurants and other attractions are. Besides maybe the beach itself, this is the most “touristy” spot in the area, and it’s certainly where most of the immediate area’s nightlife is concentrated. There are *always lots *of people on and along that area of the river 24/7/365. That is all to say that this is not a bit of rotting infrastructure in some poor, middle of nowhere “South’ren” town. I won’t even go into whether or not South Florida is really part of “The South”, since we already did that in a recent thread. (Consensus by anyone with a clue: it’s not.)
Anyway, back to the bridge itself… It’s always up until approximately two minutes before and after the very occasional train passes, so there’s almost never any issue with people trying to cross over it. (I’ve seen drunk and stupid people climb it when it’s up, though.) There are quite prominent signs that you’d have to be blind to miss. In that ~7(?) minute window before and while it goes down, the train passes, and before and while it goes back up, the alarms start blaring VERY FUCKING LOUDLY. You’d have to be deaf to miss them if you’re anywhere in the vicinity, and in fact, if you’re in the immediate vicinity you’ll think you are going to go deaf, because you can’t hear anything else!
So yeah, if you’re drunk, stupid, blind, deaf, or more likely some combination thereof, you *might *be one of the “unwary” that the bridge could kill in “gruesome ways”, but then again, I can probably think of hundreds of things the average person encounters in everyday life that are not only much more hazardous, but are also much less obviously so. With the extremely heavy 24/7 foot traffic in that area, which skews towards drunk/drugged/deranged party-goers, the bridge’s operational safety record is probably quite good. Anybody that gets injured/killed by it would probably just have gotten injured/killed somewhere/anywhere else, even if it didn’t exist.