Living in the San Francisco Bay area is a surrealistic experience, and the looniness of the more extreme denizens could take up most of the space here at SHS. Two local controversies have involved whether to put suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge and another is the coddling of tree-sitting protesters who are trying to prevent a small grove of oaks from being cut down in order to build a UC Berkeley athletic center. The difference between the fervor of the tree protesters—which UC Berkeley in its time-tested pattern has utterly coddled—and the public attention to the GGB issue, caught one letter writer’s attention in today’s SF Chronicle:
Editor—Did anyone else notice the striking irony between two headlines in the July 23 Chronicle (“Suicide barrier: Emotions high” and “Judge hands Cal a big win in athletic center fight”)?
Isn’t it sad there seems to be a higher number of people fighting to save the oak trees next to Memorial Stadium than there are people who are fighting to prevent future suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge? What has become of our society? Do we value the lives of trees more than the lives of our depressed brothers and sisters? If you’re in favor of saving a tree, shouldn’t you also be in favor of saving human lives? We can always replace a tree that we have cut down but a life lost on the Golden Gate Bridge can never be replaced.
There are a lot of misplaced priorities in today’s society. Some, in my view, come from rejecting human exceptionalism. When we personalize fauna and flora, we diminish the intrinsic importance of human life. And that plays out in many ways, both big, and as here, small, in the misplaced priorities about which the letter writer is so concerned.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Lift My Chin, Lord
Lift my chin, Lord,Say to me,“You are not whoYou feared to be,Not Hecate, quite,With howling sound,Torch held…
Letters
Two delightful essays in the March issue, by Nikolas Prassas (“Large Language Poetry,” March 2025) and Gary…
Spring Twilight After Penance
Let’s say you’ve just comeFrom confession. Late sunPours through the budding treesThat mark the brown creek washing Itself…
