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The Superhero Handbook
A Do-Gooder's Guide to Saving the Planet A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Production Notes This is a DRAFT document, and everything here is subject to editing. Your feedback is encouraged! FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
Let's look again at triage—the process of deciding how to distribute your limited resources when the need is overwhelming. On the surface, triage seems to provide a pretty good philosophy for all superhero interventions—i.e., you always want to apply your powers to the places where they will do the most good. Continuous triage, however, often leads to fatigue and burnout, especially if you are engaged in a battle without end.
If you are gifted/cursed with super senses and are aware of all the suffering around you, you know the world is a war zone. No matter how great your super powers may be, the needs of your society will always outstrip them. Helping the needy in even the most prosperous country is not much different than operating a field hospital on the front lines of combat. Casualties will always outnumber the beds available to treat them, so you have to judiciously choose which patients you are going to treat and how much of your resources you will devote to them.
If faced with too many problems, triage demands that you always focus on the most critical and solvable ones where your resources will be put to the best use. In combat conditions like this, every day is go, go, go. You save one child, let another die, fly to Bangkok to save 50 children on a school bus while 3 more perish in Detroit. Triage tells you that you must always focus on the most important need, bypassing any frivolous or unproductive action and never letting a moment go to waste.
But here's the problem: If you're a caped crusader racing from one corner of the world to another, triaging constantly and never wasting anything, when are you going to do your laundry?
Even super suits get dirty and have to be washed, right? When are you going to do it? If you take an hour now to run your suit through the Whirlpool, sixteen innocent children are going to die in Bangladesh. Since when is doing laundry more important than saving lives? On the other hand, no one wants to be saved by a stinky superhero. If you look like Super Homeless Dude flying through the air, your public image is going to suffer. Isn't this worth something? Is it sometimes more important to look good than to save a life?
In a M*A*S*H unit, the casualties are not steady and continuous. Instead, they tend to come in waves. There are periods when the wounded overwhelm the available services and the staff has to work all-out to treat as many of them as possible. However, there are also usually slow periods when the backlog of patients is cleared out, storerooms are resupplied and the staff has a chance to rest. These down times are essential to the health of the system.
We are coming, now, into the issue of self-maintenance. Every superhero needs to devote some time to themselves and to maintaining their own internal systems. This is a function that can sometimes be delayed, but ultimately it must overrule the needs of the outside world.
Yes, it can be more important to do your laundry than to save sixteen children in Bangladesh. Children are dying every day, even as you sleep, and you can't save them all. In spurts, you can probably save a lot of children and get by without eating or sleeping, but sooner or later, you have to return to base and engage in routine maintenance. Remember that safety is your top priority, and you can't be safe if you are neglecting your own health and are always burning the candle at both ends.
Think of yourself as a craftsman who owns a set of power tools—power saw, electric drill, arc welder, etc. Everything you build in this world is done by the means of these tools. If the tools fail, you are powerless to accomplish anything, so it is important that you invest in their maintenance. Oiling and cleaning your tools may seem trivial compared to needs you serve through them, but the maintenance is still essential.
Your super power, whatever it may be, is a tool, as are your body, your mind and the cave in which you live. All of these things have to be adequately maintained if you expect to save anyone at all. If your tool is a motor vehicle, you have to change the oil sooner or later or the vehicle will stop operating. Likewise, you must eventually attend to your own essential maintenance, regardless of what the cost to others might be.
No matter how many vulnerable people depend on you, you have to find the time to relax in private and clip your toenails. If you don't, they will eventually grow into hideous claws that inhibit your performance. Notice, however, that I said "clip" your toenails and not "paint" them. Because so much is resting on your shoulders, you have to draw a distinction between essential self-maintenance and wasteful self-indulgence. You wouldn't want to be seen painting your toenails while thousands suffer, but trimming them is unavoidable.
Knowing how much needs to be done in the world, the greatest sin any of us can commit is to waste time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't relax, however. Withdrawing temporarily from the game and rethinking your strategy can be seen as a legitimate maintenance activity even if you are not accomplishing anything tangible during this time. Lounging in the bathtub isn't necessarily a sin, as long as you are truly regrouping and not just killing time.
Continuing your education is not killing time. Whatever your special skills may be, there is usually more you can learn about them. Sometimes, the public is better served in the long run when you don't engage in continuous battle but occasionally withdraw to hone your skills and reenvision the problem.
Of all the tools in your arsenal, your brain is the most peculiar. To perform at peak efficiency, it needs extensive periods of rest every day. There are those six to eight hours of unconsciousness at night, but even during the day the brain must occasionally be allowed to ruminate without any specific goal. The brain is a unique tool in that the quantity of work it produces is not as important as the quality. One good idea, carefully thought out, can sometimes save thousands of hours of rescue work, and how that idea is conceived is not always predictable.
Your brain is capable of bypassing triage by changing the rules of the game. You could use every moment of the day trying to save people, or you can give your brain the opportunity to digest the problem. What your brain might come up with is a better solution, an approach you might never have previously considered that might accomplish more while not requiring you to race around as much.
Remember that what is important for your legacy is not the number of people you save right now, but your total net impact on the planet across all of time. It might feel good to save individual children, just like it feels good to feed the pigeons, but what really counts is the overall health of all children, which isn't necessarily a function of the number of raw rescues conducted.
We have spoken before about "higher level" interventions. Instead of racing around saving people, you could devote more energy to addressing the systems that place people in peril. Such a systemic approach might appear to be self-indulgent at first, but it has the potential of saving more people with less energy.
For example, you could devote you super powers exclusively to fighting crime, as many uniformed crusaders do, but you would always be fighting a losing battle. For every hooligan you put behind bars, another is bound to take his place. It may be more effective, over time, to look at the conditions that lead to crime and try to mitigate them. This is the kind of endeavor the brain is uniquely suited to.
If you find yourself engaging in the same sort of rescue over and over again, you may not be working in the most efficient manner possible. Both for the good of humanity and for your own emotional health, you always want to be "looking higher"—that is, trying to address your problems from a wider perspective.
Ultimately, your legacy is not a function of how frantically you race around the world, how many innocents your rescue, or how you account for every minute of the day. Your true accomplishment depends on how wise you are in the design of your actions. Rather than carpet-bombing a target with your whole arsenal, you want to make the sort of low-energy precision strike that changes everything.
Continued in Chapter 14
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