Opinion: Falling Down and Finger-Pointing

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The cops say he had been drinking ‘quite a bit’ before he tried to slide down the banister of a moving escalator Saturday night at the Hollywood and Highland vertical mall, the purpose-built home of the Academy Awards ceremony.

He fell several floors to the steps of another escalator and died.

The same stunt seemed to work just fine on ‘Jackass.’

Now, as sure as the law of gravity, somebody is going to sue somebody over this — that latter somebody probably having deep and public pockets, like the city of Los Angeles. And somebody will start a hue and cry to reconfigure those murderous escalators, even shut them down, so they can’t kill juiced-up, foolhardy young men ever again.

To the city and to the lawyers of Los Angeles, I beg you: for once, please, don’t go there. We can’t doofus-proof the whole world. In this country we don’t seem to believe that anything happens simply by accident, and that if ‘stuff happens,’ someone has to pay.

Someone already has — a young man, with his life. Let that be an end to it. And the lesson of it.