Despair in the Suburbs

The idyllic life of the suburbs has been a concept that has been constructed and destroyed many times over in our culture and media. People tend to move out from city centers to suburban areas with the good intentions of providing their families more space, better schools and as a escape from the hustle, frenzy and crime in the city. Of course, scratch the surface and you see that all is not hunky-dory in the suburbs, either. This whole premise has been captured in movies such as American Beauty and Revolutionary Road (apparently, director Sam Mendes really had a bad suburban upbringing and has devoted part of his career to fight the machine).

On occasion, this rears its head in close proximity when it hits my town, as it did a few weeks ago when rush hour trains were suspended after a man allegedly commit suicide at our neighborhood train station. It hit home not just because it happened in my town, but it actually suspended the train I was taking back home (the incident occurred 10 minutes before my train was going to pull into the station) and I saw the aftermath many hours later, first with the emergency vehicles and the sand presumably covering any residual human remains on the track the next morning.

The police haven't officially ruled it as such, but with an eyewitness account that the man dived on the tracks towards an oncoming train, the deduction seems reasonable. Interestingly, the comments section below that same article led to an interesting exchange which perhaps is emblematic of the culture of coldness in suburban life. Here are some of the entries:

Wow! This is becoming a commonplace. Very sad and selfish way to end it.

I think it is unfair to call this man selfish. He clearly had major problems in his life to do this, ones he could not cope with. We won't know what those issues were but regardless, its still not right to add a "selfish" label to him. This was an act of desperation and mental illness. Its very sad that there was no one that he could have turned to for help in working out whatever issues he was facing.

There was a whole train crew that had it a lot worse than being "late for Jeopardy". So yes, committing suicide by jumping in front of a train is an act that no amount of depression or mental illness excuses. And the horrible consequences on others from the act should be the prominent factor in any discussion of the event.

I would say that even the most depressed understand the implication of jumping in front of a train and its extreme impact on others (and I mean mostly the impact on the crew) and do not deserve any kind of a pass for making that particular decision. Jumping in front of a train is a willful decision to make the maximum impact, its effect on others be damned.

I just have compassion primarily for the train crew and any others who saw what happened. They are the only victims here and they are the only ones who need and deserve sympathy and expressions of concern.

I have no sympathy for the victim, but I do for his family. To have the options available to take care of business in private and disrupt only their immediate family/friends merits sympathy. To do it in a public place where innocent bystanders are horrified witnesses, to traumatize the engineers/conductors who are unwillingly facilitating their death and to then hold up thousands of passengers coming home from work is the definition of selfishness. What other reason would they go out this way other than to get attention? I do not need to be a shrink or have a PhD to know when someone is being a dick, most people can tell right away.

There was a mix of people who were outraged that the man was so selfish to kill himself to the distress and inconvenience of everyone else, and those who were outraged that people had the nerve to call suicide a selfish act. What is universal is that nobody is surprised in the least bit that this happened. There's no illusion that upper-middle class suburbia is paradise, and even our little community of good schools and relative financial plenty is somehow immune from despair which drives someone to end their life. Accounts like this simply become additional sad fodder for the reality that there's nothing that money can buy or human hand can fabricate to replace the God-shaped hole that resides in every soul.

As far as the harsher reactions of some of the fellow suburbanites, I'm not sure this is proof positive that suburbanites are any more or less insensitive or callous than your average city dweller. The knee-jerk (and probably unfair) deduction is that suburbanites, by their choice to live in a suburb, value convenience, privacy, self-order and the accumulation of material possessions at the expense of shared community, human interaction and spontaneity. Thus the focus on the inconvenience of thousand of suburbanite commuters instead of a sympathizing with a tormented soul who felt that ending his life at the wheels of a train was the best option.

I don't think it's that simple. I think a bigger part of it has to do with the human condition and how we're all plagued with sin. We're terrible at putting other people's needs above our own, and have lost the discipline and the culture of the Good Samaritan. Today's American version of the Good Samaritan too often ends with the Samaritan furious that the beaten traveler is reducing property values by drawing attention to rampant crime in the area. As far as the suburban idols of convenience, privacy, self-order and accumulation of material possessions? I'd say those are American cultural, if not universal idols prevalent no matter where people live.

Then again, would the reaction have been the same in suburban Indianapolis? Maybe it's a New York metropolitan suburban thing.