After the 3rd death from a fall at the Grand Canyon in eight days maybe it's time to take all the selfie sticks and cameras away before visitors enter the park. Clearly they can't be trusted to have the common sense not to try to negotiate the assorted precarious ledges, lookouts without killing themselves. But maybe it is more a case of being unable to accept reality: that the positions and postures needed to snap that supremo selfie - say at Yosemite or the Grand Canyon - are simply beyond one's physical ability.
A week ago we learned that for the 259th time in 6 years a tourist has fallen to his death trying to get the optimal selfie shot from a precarious precipice. This time it was a Chinese tourist from Hong Kong who died after he over a thousand feet into the Grand Canyon while trying to take photos last Thursday near the rim of Eagle Point. This according according to David Leibowitz, a spokesman for Grand Canyon West.
Leibowitz said a tour group from Hong Kong was visiting the Grand Canyon, and many of the tourists were taking photos very close to the rim of the canyon. As with most selfie takers, such as a dumb lot who are nearly knocked over during bike races, they take enormous risks for "the money shot". In this case tragedy arrived when the selfie taker while attempting to snap a photo at Eagle Point, adjacent to the popular Skywalk attraction, accidentally fell off the rim and into the canyon. We're talking of thousands of feet down.
A subsequent helicopter search located the 50-year-old man's body at the bottom of the canyon, which was then transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital. Grand Canyon West is an area of the canyon west of Grand Canyon National Park that is owned and operated by the Hualapai Indian Tribe. The tribal nation operates the popular Skywalk bridge and other attractions in that area, which is west of the National Park.
Beyond the reckless bid for the perfecto shot, we also know selfie compulsives are warping the entire tourist landscape, including our national parks. According to one park ranger interviewed in a UK Guardian piece on how our national parks are going to rack and ruin. e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/20/national-parks-america-overcrowding-crisis-tourism-visitation-solutions
We're informed that now tourists to Yellowstone regularly scramble from their vehicles - even temporarily abandoning them - in the hope of getting an close up photo. So what gives? In a post five years ago, I pretty well summed up the selfie syndrome :
"The 'selfie' embodies all the gratuitous self-infatuation that is poisoning this country - causing it to mutate into a bunch of navel-gazing zomboids with faces pushed into assorted small screens. This is whether via smart phones or iphones- and always intruding into the natural world. "
I even quoted my sister-in-law Krimhilde, a student of Eckankar for most of her adult life:
"These are the creations and obsessions of the immature human, which remains steeped in narcissism, in self-absorption. No truly advanced or advancing human on the path to a higher spirituality takes a selfie. Our true motivation and mission in this life is instead to embrace selflessness. That means placing one's body in proper relation to one's spirit."
Less often noted than risky ledge shots - like at the Grand Canyon - is the ongoing spoiling of natural landscapes, overrun by humans with long, unsightly selfie sticks. Add to that now a pathological impetus to change one's looks to meet "selfie standards." Nowhere was this pathology more glaringly exposed than in a recent Denver Post piece (March 17, p. 4E), where a psychologist pointed out:
"The confidence of many younger people is being warped in unsettling ways. They come to my offices, show me selfies and point (say) to an asymmetry in their lips - a totally normal variation. They will already have searched online for someone with a similar issue who fixed it with surgery and now want it done."
Insane? Of course! Given every cosmetic surgery of this type necessitates having general anesthesia which can have calamitous results if it goes awry. This is why they ask you to present a 'DNR' (do not resuscitate form) or produce a durable power of attorney before going under. In other words, it's not something you'd undertake casually and certainly not to get lips fixed!
But while such idiotic vanity surgeries could result in death - or even brain damage or dysfunction - leaning over a ledge several thousand feet up can result in certain death - as occurred to the Hong Kong tourist. What provoked him to take such a risk in pursuit of an image with one's smiling face is a subject for the psychologists like my great niece Shayle.
While they are at it they might also ruminate on why a young female moron at an Arizona zoo several weeks ago, jumped a barrier to snap a selfie with a black Jaguar. See e.g.
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