Friday, November 30, 2007 Seares: Crowds can be mean By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
POLICE and firefighters didn’t have a net or other device to catch a man who jumped off a three-story building last Tuesday.
Saddening about Cebu City that strives “to be second to none.” But even the shortage in service that day was obscured by something bizarre in crowd behavior: people teasing the man to jump.
The man was heart-broken. He and his live-in partner, the woman of his life, had a huge quarrel.
While the police were trying to persuade him to go down, curiosity seekers were chanting “Ambak! Ambak! (Jump! Jump!),” egging him to do what he threatened to do.
He had stayed there atop the Sawang Calero boarding house for almost an hour, apparently unsure whether the woman was worth dying for.
Be serious, the crowd shouted. They wouldn’t be cheated of the free show’s finale: the man falling and landing on the ground. He jumped and survived but his body was wrecked in many parts.
Man on fire
Years ago, a man poured gas all over his body and set himself on fire at Plaza Independencia while the crowd watched, with no one trying to seize the matches from him.
Radio reporters covering the event weren’t bothered that a suicide was taking place right before their eyes. They were there to report the event, not to stop it--–or so went the twisted logic and bent ethics.
Tuesday’s crowd was worse. They didn’t just watch. They prodded the man to “go ahead, kill yourself.”
A crowd can turn ugly and mean. It can protect a drug lord from arrest by blocking cops in pursuit, or beat a suspected thief to near death.
Weird. Weirder still is that no one is ever held responsible for those acts: senseless, at times criminal.
