Memorial Weekend

In honor of Memorial weekend we bring you a story of a retired soldier who not only saved a man's life yesterday, but also gave hundreds of people the gift of "time."

Lai Jiansheng is 66 years old and served in the Chinese military. Yesterday during his commute he came upon a traffic jam caused by a man threatening to jump of the Haizhu Bridge in Guangzhou. The would be suicide offender had recently lost nearly 2 million yen ($300,000) in a bad construction deal. After learning of the situation, Mr. Jiansheng offered his negotiating skills to the police, but they declined.

However, after waiting five hours for the situation to be resolved and the bridge to reopen, Mr. Jiansheng decide to take matters into his own hands. He broke past the police barricade, climbed out to the jumper, shook the dude's hand and then pushed him off the bridge.

No worries, the pushed survived because he landed on the air cushion that was set up below. Mr. Jiansheng's reasoning behind the push:

"I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish," the newspaper quoted Mr Lai as saying.

"Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."

I'm not sure if the jumper was making any appeals to the government, but I do agree with the fact that suicide is a selfish act when attempted by adults who are able to reason properly. Mr. Jiansheng did not attempt to kill the man, he only wanted to resolve a nuisance and save some people some time, and that is exactly what he accomplished. This Memorial weekend let us all try to be like Mr. Jiansheng by pushing the annoying things in life out of our way so we can free up time to focus on the important things in life.

source