Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Mike Garry - poet, teacher, hero

I've linked before to Mike Garry's emotional and powerful writing. Well, this account of his encounter with an apparently suicidal man on a bridge is spellbinding. What a hero.

3 comments:

NotimefirDiane said...

I've met Mike a few times and he's a nice guy. His story here is interesting and well done him for getting involved and not walking on the other side.

That said, there does seem to be a certain self - congratulation and moreover self promotion surrounding this to the extent, the victim of depression, the guy who Was on the brink seemed to be a pawn in the circus. I'm sure he didn't want to have his lowest ebb tweeted and retweeted and then updated with the update 'tweet-trailored' and turned into a tweet soap. I wonder if the vi ten knew the guy who helped him was going to schedule his heroics every 1/2 hour, would he have been more or less inclined to jump?

Michael Taylor said...

Tough call that. I thought Mike made a decent justification of why he wrote it up on his follow up. And to be fair, it wasn't him who punted it so widely on Twitter.

Dianne Abbott said...

I don't know if Mike perhaps got carried away with the interest but a glance at the time line suggests there could be a little bit of those 6 minutes of fame gave him a taste of the limelight. Direct tweeting Rooney perhaps could be excused if the victim was a Manure fan but I can't see direct tweeting John Prescott as being a comfort. Perhaps the guy was suicidal over the financial plight and he wanted to let Prescott know just what it meant to people? Knowing Mike's politics, I suspect not.

As I said, it was a good thing to do and given his oratory, Mike's a good guy to have to talk people around. Perhaps this will inspire him to volunteer for the Samaritans which would be very positive. There just seemed to be too many links to blogs, books and being available to poetry readings for corporates events about is all.