|
|
|
| |||||||
| ||||||||
| Home | Contents | MediaStream ↑News+Blog↑ |
Entities | Newsletters | Book | Philosophy | Photos |
 |
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 |
On the battlefield or during a natural disaster, there may be many more wounded people than medical resources to treat them. If there are a hundred injured soldiers and only the personnel and supplies to treat ten of them, then some terrible decisions have to be made. Who do you treat, and who do you let die?
In a military M*A*S*H unit, the decision is going to be made by a relatively low-level nurse or medic in the waiting area outside the operating tent. The nurse decides that one soldier goes in while another is held back, knowing full well that this is a life-or-death decision for both. It is a brutal and terrifying process but a necessary one. If the nurse doesn't choose and simply lets every wounded soldier into the operating room, then the surgeons will be overwhelmed and no one at all will be saved. On the other hand, if the nurse excludes one wounded soldier in favor of a move saveable one, she earns the privilege of watching the excluded one die.
How would you perform under those circumstances? Would you hold up under the pressure, or would you break down? This is more than an academic question, because it is the sort of thing you have to do every day as a superhero.
The medical process of sorting and selecting the wounded is called "triage." The goal is to save the maximum total number of lives with the limited resources available, and this requires parcelling out resources in an often brutal way. The lightly wounded soldiers are probably going to be passed over, at least for now, because they will probably survive without treatment. The most gravely wounded soldiers might also be left alone, because they are likely to die no matter what you do. Furthermore, a massively wounded soldier is probably going to require huge resources that might save several others.
Who you end up treating in times of crisis are a certain middle class of "severe but saveable" patients — those who would die without treatment but whose wounds require only moderate resources to repair.
You may see the word "TRIAGE" at the first nurse's station you encounter in any big-city emergency room. This nurse takes your blood pressure, asks you some questions and makes a quick decision about your condition. She has the power to wheel you immediately into the trauma center or make you sit for hours in the waiting area.
Modern hospitals in prosperous countries are usually well-equipped, and in the end almost everyone who comes into an emergency room is eventually treated, but this is not necessarily true outside the emergency room. If you are involved in any helping profession, from child welfare to mental health to trying to feed the starving millions in Africa, you know that the needs of the community far outstrip the available resources. Virtually every effort to help others is an exercise in triage, where you are trying to parcel out limited services to address an overwhelming need.
If you aren't trying to save people from actual death, then you are at least trying to save them from a sort of emotional death that will have negative effects for all of society. If a child is being abused and you fail to protect him, you know he is probably going to grow up to be an abuser himself, victimizing many more children. If you make a triage decision not to intervene in one child's tragedies there could be a terrible price to pay, but you have to balance the needs and "saveability" of this child with the countless others who also need your help. It's often a no-win situation where you have to choose the "least worst" of all the alternatives.
The problem is especially acute for superheroes who are gifted/cursed with extraordinary senses. If you happen to have super hearing, x-ray vision or the ability to read minds, you already know your power is not a blessing; it's torture. You can see, hear and feel the senseless suffering all around, and you can't shut it off. It may seem like an asset to stand on a street corner and be able to hear someone cry for help a mile away, but that's not the way things really work. The reality is, you stand on a street corner and hear hundreds, maybe thousands of desperate cries for help from truly innocent victims, only a few of which you can do anything about. That's the curse of extraordinary senses.
When a superhero saves a child from a runaway truck, people often want to reward him. The mayor wants to give him the key to the city, and the Rotary Club wants to hold a parade in his honor. Under these circumstances, experienced superheroes are profoundly uneasy and would like to skip the ceremony if at all possible. They aren't comfortable accepting the kudos because they secretly know all the things they haven't done. To save this one child, they may have had to let another one die. Of all the cries for help, they chose to act on this one but had to ignore all the others. In the superhero's mind, it isn't a cause for celebration that only one child was saved. Triage is always brutal compromise, and the hero knows it.
Understanding triage is absolutely essential for being an effective superhero. It is a different kind of decision-making process than you might be used to. We commonly think of decisions in terms of "right" and "wrong". It is "right" to save the life of a child, and "wrong" to let him die. Triage rephrases every decision in terms of the allocation of limited resources. Given the current circumstances, what is the most effective use of our finite intervention capability? We can all agree that children should be saved; the real question is which children should be saved when the needs are greater than our resources.
Once you understand triage, you'll see that almost every decision is a triage decision. If you allocate your limited resources to one activity, you are automatically taking them away from other worthy causes. If you decide to take a vacation and go to Tahiti for a week, you are implicitly killing people. What happens when someone cries for help back home and you aren't there? If something terrible happens while you are away, how will you live with yourself? I'm not saying you shouldn't go to Tahiti, but you have to be aware of the true costs and be able to justify them in good faith against the needs of the world.
Triage encourages us to see the big picture. As valuable as one life may be, it's the total net effect on all lives that is most important. As a medic on the battlefield or a superhero in civilian life, you are forced to start dealing with tragedy and human suffering on the "wholesale" level rather than the "retail" one. Retail is when you are concerned with the needs of only the one customer in front of you. Wholesale is when you are concerned about all the customers. At the wholesale level, you tend to be more cool and calculating, and you develop a thicker skin about individual suffering. You know that you may have to lose a few of your customers to better serve the majority.
The inevitable terror of triage is that you have to say "no" to worthy causes, and you have to let people die. It is not that you are actively killing people in the sense of putting a bullet in their head. Instead, you are simply choosing not to intervene, which may end in the same result. Triage says that intervention is not automatic—that you have a choice and must use it intelligently. If you see someone suffering, you can choose to walk away. Indeed, you must walk away at times to protect your own powers.
As a superhero, no one understands as well as you how limited your resources are. The more powerful and omnicient you become compared to others, the more you recognize your own weakness and relative smallness in relation to the problems of the world. Experienced superheroes know that life is a war zone and that there are very few pleasant options. To save someone, you might have to sacrifice someone else. To be kind, you sometimes have to be cruel. To be effective in the real world, you may have to make terrible decisions that will haunt you forever.
Once you gain that extraordinary vision and can see all the suffering around you, it is impossible to turn back. You can't close Pandora's Box. You can try lying on the beach on Tahiti, but you probably won't enjoy yourself. There are all those cries for help that reach you even here, and you have to find a way to deal with them.
Continued in Chapter 9
 |
©2005-07, Glenn Campbell, PO Box 30303, Las
Vegas, NV 89173.
This is an independent and unofficial website. All opinions expressed are those of the webmaster and not any other party. Information conveyed here is accurate to the best of our knowledge but is not guaranteed. You should seek your own independent verification of critical information.
Total page hits at FamilyCourtChronicles.com: |
