The Bridge

This is not a typical post for this blog. It isn't really a post about God, not really. I would say more that God has put this message on my heart, for those who do not speak for themselves.

You know this bridge I am sure. It's world famous. It might conjure mental images of streetcars, fog, hilly steep streets, great food, or even Rice-A-Roni (which ran many ads featuring San Francisco streetcars when I was younger). It has appeared in many movies. It is an iconic emblem of San Francisco: The Golden Gate Bridge.

What it probably doesn't bring to mind, is that it is the number one location on Planet Earth for suicides. Not just in California, or the United States, but it is the number one location for suicides IN THE WHOLE WORLD. Even the Aokigahara suicide forest in Japan only takes second place to the Golden Gate Bridge.

And yet, despite decades of attempts to have it built, there is still no barrier to prevent people from jumping. The fence at the edge is only 4 feet high. Some argue that anyone who would commit suicide by jumping would do it anyway: they are wrong. Suicide is an acute threat: someone who is prevented from killing themselves in a 72 hour period of their worst risk is actually unlikely to do it at another time. Every minute of delay or inconvenience could save a life. The Golden Gate Bridge is like having a publicly accessible loaded handgun in a public place, where everyone knows it is there and anyone can use it at any time.

Many people who are having a suicidal crisis believe that nobody cares if they live or die. While that is not true of their family and friends, I am afraid it is true of the public at large. The reasons that the barrier has not been put up on the bridge as of yet boil down to issues of money and power. The bridge is a symbol of San Francisco, a contributing factor to the tourist economy. Almost any barrier will be less aesthetically pleasing than no barrier. The appearance of the bridge is a financial asset that people want to protect: lives lost are not really a concern since they are lost "voluntarily". People are also largely very unsympathetic to the depressed, as to the mentally ill in general. People raising funds on the street for a barrier are often accosted by people yelling "Jump! Jump!" and people throw soft drink cans at them. It's sickening.

And in fact there was no problem building a barrier partly on the Oakland side, because it overhung the land and people were dropping objects like bowling balls over the side. It was a public safety issue then. Assisting the emotionally distraught apparently is not a public safety issue.

So the people who think that the world is uncaring, that nobody cares, sadly for the most part they are right. There is still a huge stigma on mental illness in this country. Most people are very unsympathetic to the suicidal, to the point of even encouraging these extremely distraught individuals to end it all. One suicidal man wrote a suicide note saying that if only one person smiled at him as he went up the bridge, he wouldn't kill himself. Apparently, no one smiled. Most of the people who jumped, had a treatable mental illness. If there were a 72 hour virus that could kill you, but which was very much treatable, people would be urging people to get treatment and would be sympathetic to their situation. Towards people with a treatable mental illness that could end their life, however, there is often a great deal of hostility. Even hatred. Even in liberal San Francisco. A city where you can find groups that believe that pets should have human rights, isn't quite as enthusiastic about the human welfare of some human beings. We have removed stigmas about all sorts of things, even stigmas against gays and those with AIDS, but this stigma it seems, too few have the heart to fight to remove.

Anyone who wants to keep up with the barrier project, the link is http://www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org/

For anyone who is suicidal who might stumble across this page, I want to say this:

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DON'T DO IT, PLEASE. THIS IS ONLY A TEMPORARY AND TREATABLE CONDITION. YOU CAN GET HELP.

I know that it might feel like you are nobody and nothing, but that is a lie. You are in fact special. You can in fact make a difference for somebody else, just by being here. Don't buy into the lies that the World tries to sell you, to your detriment. You may not think or feel that there is a God, you may in fact be adamantly opposed to the idea, but I know there is one, and He doesn't want you to leave before you get to know Him. God loves you, and there are people who are sympathetic and know what you are going through. Find them, and Him. The results of suicide are tragic and permanent.
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Suicide Crisis Hotline:
1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433)
1-800-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

The Will to Power

"The World is a will to power, and nothing besides."
-Nietzsche

In order to understand where our hope lies, we have to truly understand this reality. We have to understand that if truth, love, harmony and peace are our guides, hope in this world (but not necessarily hope for all those within) is irredeemably lost. Lost from the beginning, lost by design.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the poet laureate of the Will to Power. Many people do not like to read him and see in him a symbol of evil, but this is mostly because he tells them a terrible truth (about this world anyway) that they do not want to hear. While Nietzsche thought of the will to truth as a variety of the will to power, in fact those who are the most interested in power hate the truth because it undermines their power. With this in mind, lets hear a few more words from him:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §636

Every living thing, in other words, strives to be God. Not to follow, love or obey God, but to be itself God. This process is by no means limited to human beings, but is implicit in every living thing. The first woodpecker with a beak suitable for drilling wood, its beak gave it a power over the grubs living in the wood and so it prospered over its neighbors that were without that power. The first bacterium that was able to eat its neighbor, extended its power over that neighbor and assimilated its material for itself. Human beings developed tools, to do what their weak bodies could not do. Because part of their success depended on cooperation and because of the advent of language, human beings became much more subtle in their methods of obtaining power, and power became much more dangerous. They used and twisted language to gain power over others. Their knowledge gave them power over the atom, allowed them to mitigate space and time, made them lords over all other living beings. The Will to Power didn't start with them, they simply took it to its logical conclusion.

But like Sauron's One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, power corrupts all, even those who say they want to use it for good. The nuclear power plants that we build to supply us with bountiful power in electrical form, are subject to disaster and poison the land and sea. Political power leads to war and destruction. Power over the ecology leads to ecological disaster. Power over men destroys mens lives and the souls of the ones who wields that power. Physically, power gives life: spiritually, power destroys life. And in the end, this massive all-encompassing Will to Power, is a plan destined to fail. Even if humans become immune to old age, extend their power over the stars themselves, become like gods, their end is unavoidable. Eventually the stars will grow dim and cold. Eventually the Universe and Power itself will die.

And yet to live here and now is to compromise with power, even to get what we need to keep surviving is part of that all-embracing Will to Power. To eat is power, even to breathe is power. Life itself in this world is a will to power. This is part of our nature, our original sin. The best thing we can do is to know this will to power for what it really is, to use it only when we must, to shed the light of God on the darkened world and in our own minds, to uproot the lies of power. In this, perhaps in this alone, Nietzsche was less than honest: his religious upbringing led to his thirst for truth (such as it was). The will to power only allows that truth that extends its power: shedding light on power itself undermines power. Human power hates the light, and lives in the darkness of lies and half-truths where it can work its evil will undetected.

Our bodies are slaves to power by birth. I believe our souls need not be.

We know that the Law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the Law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

-Romans 7:14-20