Standing room only: Mind your own business, please

We were descending slowly down the very steep and dangerous Sitinjau Lauik stretch of road between Solok and Padang in West Sumatra.

In the cool air, the view from the top of the mountains was simply magnificent. Then we saw some cars and trucks parked on both sides of the road ahead. As we got closer, we could also see two police patrol cars and an ambulance.

"A car must have plunged into the ravine," said the driver of the Kijang van that we were renting for our trip. "It's a very deep one down there. Shall we stop and have a look?"

"Let's just go on," I said. When we passed the skid marks and the broken tree branches at the spot where the vehicle must have left the road, I prayed silently Inna lilahi wa ina ilahi raji'un.

Should we have stopped? No, I don't believe so. There were already several policemen, paramedics and more than two dozen people at the scene. If we had stopped, all we would be doing was increasing the number of parked cars there and making the crowd larger.

It is unexplainable to me why motorists always slow down each time they see an accident, take a prolonged look at the damaged vehicles and in the meantime cause traffic behind them to halt. It happens all the time, and it is one of the most frequent causes of major traffic snarls on our toll roads.

Do you still remember one day several years ago when the Tanah Abang-Rangkasbitung train got derailed in Palmerah, Jakarta? There were no casualties, as the train had just left the Palmerah substation. Yet, people emerged from all over the place to the scene and caused massive traffic jams along surrounding streets.

I felt so sorry for my cab driver who took three hours to take me from Shangri-la Hotel to the office of this publication in Palmerah. Normally, it would take no more than 20 minutes.

On Sept. 9, after the terrorists' bomb blast in front of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, I sat glued to my TV set. I cried when I saw the victims, and when I saw people helping one another immediately after the explosion.

However, when the police and the paramedics arrived, I began to wonder why the crowd did not immediately leave the area and let them do their job? And then, in the middle of my inability to comprehend the purpose of the bomb, my grief turned to anger as I saw a policeman, caught live on the video camera, repeatedly begging the cameraman and others to move outside the police line.

It is common knowledge that, once the police line has been put in place, everybody but authorized personnel must immediately leave the cordoned off area. Emergency personnel need space to perform their duties. Besides, the police must make sure that any evidence is not disturbed.

Every cameraman and reporter should know this. Why begging was necessary was totally beyond me.

Soon afterwards thousands of people flooded the street near the embassy. Again, massive but unnecessary traffic congestion ensued. Again, I was left in disbelief. Local TV stations were reporting the incident live from the area, so why didn't these people just stay home to watch? Who knows, there might have been a second bomb waiting to explode.

Do we really have to see with our own eyes bodies being lifted from a deep ravine? Do we really have to gaze at a derailed train for hours as some sort of communal get-together?

Do we really have to be there after a suicide bomb has caused so much human suffering? Is it really heroic to be able to declare to our friends and neighbors, "I saw mutilated bodies being carried into the ambulance"?

Folks, if you don't have any business down there, why don't you just stay away? Let the police, the firemen and the paramedics do their job. All of us should minimize the impact instead of maximizing it.

How I wish I could say it to those sensation-hungry people who always seem to be drawn in hordes to any kind of incident -- a minor traffic accident, a domestic fight between a husband and his wife, a house fire or a major bomb blast -- and collectively make the problem much larger than it already is.

But, then, what can we do? Almost 40 years of diseducation has produced so many birdbrains among us.

-- Zatni Arbi