In the first three months that the Find a Bridge app was available, 250,000 people heard the call.
Though the app was later taken down, one righteous lawyer fought the refusal and did so on his own site: Do What’s Right, Take Flight. Even after countless attempts on his life, he finally decided to leave his site maintained in perpetuity and keep the fight alive to take flight. He’d set aside his sizable fortune--most from an inheritance of Back Bay blue blood lawyers who summered generation after generation on places like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and had been around since the dawn of time; the kind of people who wanted wind power abolished because it ruined their view but always wanted more and more fuel for homes that needed more electricity for more and more blenders for boat drinks that they drank before heading out on their boats that also needed more and more fuel, fuel that wouldn’t be around for too much longer--and made sure his site stayed online. The generations of guilt being a prime component to all that was wrong in the world finally softened him and the call was heard. Some southern religious fundamentalist groups tried to fight the site in court but lost. Instead of listening to their own calling, they yelled and hollered at the world via television and radio with self-righteous proclamations and proselytization about how no one “man” (not woman and safe to assume why from such a slice of the American population) should have the right to take flight.
One renowned self-righteous long-time talk show host even went so far as to say “that those choosing to take flight weren’t helping humanity, rather they were hurting it”. He went on a now-famous diatribe “that people killing themselves in the name of helping out humanity was counter to everything that helping each other was about in this great country which is all about being united.” But he lost all credibility when it was revealed that he was on anti-depressants for years. He ended up admitting he’d heard the call and hated being who he was but he’d rather fight his DNA than remove his corpulent self from the world for the betterment of others. The Right to Flight support group started to picket outside his radio station encouraging him to embrace the change that was inside of him. Some of the RTFers even went so far as to say that his flight would inspire other over-consuming and gluttonous people to realize their true calling, to see what they saw in the mirror and to truly embrace what they had become. “And his type only raised healthcare premiums and his type doesn’t want to pay in for universal healthcare for all even though his type was the primary culprit why costs are so high to begin with!” one protester shouted, all curled-back lips and clenched fists.
To over-consume led to your doom! they chanted outside his radio station. Others held up signs of smiling happy college students all holding hands gleefully stepping into the great unknown and doing their part for humanity.
“Why should we lead to so much waste?!” said the handsome college leader. “To spend supposedly the best four years of our lives turning off what calls out to us deep down in our souls, the very thing we push away with drinking and drugs! What right do we have to complain about food, so much food?! Each and every meal while most of the world, especially now, goes without?! Where so many barely have any water to drink yet we shit and piss on ours? What have we become?!”
The battle went on, as did the demand for more vegetarian options in college dining halls and cafeterias though they cost far more and student tuition barely covered anything anymore, including a decent education.
“But YOU, that’s all your supposedly holy and revered life is set to be!” he was challenged during a campus protest against his protest.
“All you do is LIVE to raise babies and waste and consume!” the pretty co-ed girl by the handsome leader’s side chided pushing her nose up and making pig noises at the opposition.
“We choose to fight and do what’s right!” the tall handsome male student said flipping the hair from his face, dramatically holding his megaphone aside to let the people cheer. “We, however, aren’t here to be remembered! We’re here to heal and become worm food!”
Both he and the young woman later raced off campus in a multi-car Subaru caravan to a local nearby bridge. They hollered out the windows and held up banners. They did everything they set out to do…which was never to set foot on the bridge. They had a movement to lead! When they were arrested and taken from their cars while playing bongos and singing, they pouted and frowned and swore justice. Later that night they even tried staging a flight off a two story dormitory roof only to break down in a mass of weeping and wailing and lit joints and chanting some more about their right to flight.
“It wasn’t a true calling,” the tall handsome young student said at graduation, “for some of us aren’t chosen to do what needs to be done! For those of us no longer here, it’s alright…”
And every one finished the chant: to take flight! Some parents cried but not of sadness at graduation as their dead children received their degrees posthumously. There were parental support groups from then on to discuss where students should responsibly choose to take flight.
“They’ve made their choice, they heard the voice!” was the parental groups cry. Some parents started their own support groups in support of what their children had doneand made plans for pre-set times to jump. The mindset was that if you hadn’t been called early in life than you weren’t meant to jump. But some parents wanted to do their part, they wanted to take flight with their children. One of the first groups was found, four total bodies and not one of them dead, off a bridge that was too small to take their lives. It was a pretty bridge in northern Westchester County, New York and the bridge was later viewed as cursed and all four participants—drunk on scotch, doped up on Valium and dressed in the best designer labels--spent the next two months in traction eating through tubes and protesting their right to die and eventually getting the right to assisted “life jumping.” To take flight in one’s mind was acceptable but not as revered and the ceremony at the hospital covered by the local news was embarrassing. Some teenagers even had t-shirts mocking the group of inebriated parent party crashers.
You Weren’t Called to Take the Fall!
Bridge jumping wasn’t for everyone and “posers” weren’t welcome, like parents. It was their fault the world was in the state that it was.
But who were being welcomed were all the people who needed to jump even if they hadn’t heard their own call to fall.
“The Barstool Billy’s and Betty’s need to take a stand! They need to plunge to the sacred land!” the picketers shouted. Bars around the country, workingmen and women’s bars, were being targeted as Long Overdo Souls, or L.O.S.T.s, and it was their turn to lighten the load on Earth and take a leap. One woman from Tennessee tried to say to a national reporter that her husband was tossed because God saw it was his time. The children, all tweeners, had tossed the man because he drove fast and threatened everyone who came anywhere near him. They didn’t like his dog either and tossed the dog over the bridge as well.
“He was a dick,” a local boy said to the nightly news gal.
You did your part, you old fart!
The kids found the reporter before he left town after seeing the man’s wife on the news.
“He was a waste to everyone! He was the definition of LOST!”
“But who made you judge and jury?” the reporter asked. “You’re still here. You haven’t jumped.”
And like that, two of the boys heaved themselves off the bridge they’d ask the reporter to meet them at.
“I got the call and it’s time to fall!” the first boy yelled out as he jumped, a smile on his face. The second boy could be heard laughing all the way down.
“Oh my God,” the reporter said nodding to his cameraman to follow him to the edge.
“You’ll get a No-bel because we fell!” the other two boys said standing on the bridge ledge. And with mischievous grins on their faces and salutes to the camera, over they went.
“Cut. Cut Goddamit!” the reporter barked at his cameraman. The cameraman just lowered his camera.
“Fuck me,” the reporter sighed. “If you’d filmed them over the side it’d be my ass in a sling here.”
The cameraman said nothing. He was a longtime veteran and the reporter was fairly new and went national after a long time as an entertainment reporter. The cameraman knew his job was safe and he’d be part of the award ceremony, though not brought to stage rather mentioned in thank you’s by the reporter and his multitude of bosses.
When the first Working Man casualty hit the news, things changed. God-fearing and in-their-minds hardworking Americans took to the streets.
“Hell no! We won’t go!” they cried. They held their small children in their arms showing why they couldn’t go.
Late night bridge jumps were becoming the thing of legend. The five o’clock whistle crowd was under attack and they never saw what hit them. Random invasions occurred in bars at the end of the work day and news headlines splashed around the world: tenth “victim”, the hundredth, the thousandth. The Heartland was under attack by The Bridge Jumpers.
“The blue collars have been dead inside for years! There industry’s are gone! Their factories closed!” a student group chided live on-air. “We got to help the future! Well now they can! And we’ll help them! They no longer have to be happy only during Happy Hour!”
And like that, five hooded factory workers were launched first and then followed by the dozen students that hoisted them up and over the bridge live on the internet.
“I love you, Mom and Dad!” the last student yelled as he plummeted to his death. The street cams remained unmanned and then switched over to creek bed cams two hundred feet below. The first LOST soul actually fell right at the camera and nearly blacked out the other bodies falling behind him. The microphones, however, stayed on and the sounds that followed when the bodies hit the creek bed became the most-downloaded ringtone of all time. The reason was because one of the boys had fallen on top of the man and though everything within his torso was crushed to bits and jelly, his head got an unexpected cushion. His low groans and the last sound he made—“Bye Momma”—were deemed too upsetting but many as phones went off in movie theaters and grocery stores with the boy’s last words.
But it wasn’t just students who set out to lighten the load. In island countries worldwide, more and more people chose to help Mother Earth in her quest to take their land. Most had no other choice as jobs and any hope had long since been lost. With water levels rising and islands sinking or being washed away completely due to devastating typhoons and tsunamis, islanders found their calling. The Philippines, a heavily Catholic nation and the only Asian Catholic nation in the world, jumped in whole-heartedly. Rather than continue to bow to the will of a male deity, they changed direction and turned to help the one that had sustained them for centuries. But they had a little of the Catholic guilt to work with and felt that Mother Nature deemed it their will to become Bridge Jumpers because only a woman could unleash such devastation. The Holy Mother called to them.
Bridges were swarmed with martyrs and no one stopped them. In a country that yearly featured men willingly having spikes hammered through into their hands on a cross for martyrdom, life was lost anyway. News reports showed scores of people lemming-like flowing off of whatever high bridges or cliffs could be found. Entire villages disappeared overnight as clans took flight to high places deep in the jungle and sacrificed themselves to the earth mother. The American and European students made t-shirts with The Bridge Jumper quotes in the respective languages of the islands, and all available online for purchase.
And as the world started to truly come to an end, one girl sat at home and sighed. It was she who had caused the mass acceptance of the whole thing and she wasn’t sure she wanted the responsibility anymore. And the Jumpers would come for her. That she knew. She had to jump or they’d do it for her. Jennifer Katherine Poole never saw her life ending up like this.