“Westerners don’t fear these restrictions (on fishing), even when their right to bear fishing poles isn’t secured for eternity in the Constitution. But when it comes to the right to bear arms, the reasonable limitations of fishing are swept downstream with sanity.”
Marty Jones, Writers on the Range, hcn.org/wotr
Every time there is a mass shooting or some other a significant deadly event, I look at the number “critically wounded,” for many of them will not survive. It won’t make the news when some family member has to give permission to pull the plug to some doctor who doesn’t like pulling it, but needs to do it, in order to allow someone with irreversible brain injury to die, maybe after some organs are taken for transplant, maybe not.
“Saves” out in the field that get much news coverage may not be saves. If the rescue were too late, the individual would be irreversibly brain damaged, and some guy like me eventually would tell the family the person would end up in a persistent vegetative state. At best, the family would agree on removing life support, because “(the victim) wouldn’t want to be like this.” At worst, the family would be divided, shattered, occasionally because well-meaning people in or out of the medical field would offer up platitudes like “you never know,”(we do), “hearing is the last thing to go,”(proof?) or “someone once woke up after 5 years,” (and was quadriplegic with limited cognition). I did get news coverage once, in 1983, after recommending discontinuing life support on a woman who failed to wake up after cardiac surgery. The husband agreed, but the sister did not. It went to court, and my name was in the public eye for a couple of days. I guess I said some good words, because people didn’t lambaste me (that was before anonymity of online comments), the judge agreed with me, and the woman was allowed to quietly, with dignity, die.
Two years after Roseburg, there was a brief article about a young woman who received a major brain injury and could not speak. She survived, but the hell she and the family went through, as well as the costs, born by them, those who cared for them, and society in general, were not publicized. They can’t be. There are too many—73,000 gunshot wounds a year— and I’m not even discussing auto accidents, falls, and other often preventable tragedies.
I’m not convinced the death toll from Las Vegas will remain at 58; we may not hear about the others. In the New York Times, there was an article about a woman 15 years younger than I who is now quadriplegic. When I heard “500 wounded,” I wondered how many were going to be like her. I still don’t know.
The woman probably has a C5-6 injury, got her elbow flexors partially back, but won’t get her hands or her legs back. Not at this stage. She ran a company once. Now she runs a wheelchair courtesy of Go Fund Me. I’d rather national health insurance pay for national medical costs. Then, we could see where our tax dollars are going, and ask why we aren’t trying to control firearms. I don’t know the size of her medical bills in Nevada or now in California, where she is getting rehab not far from where the San Bernardino mass shooting took place. These days, it’s not difficult to be close to a past mass shooting. I am within 10 miles of the Springfield, Oregon high school, where four died 20 years ago, an hour from Roseburg, and two hours from Portland. I lived 4 miles from where Gabby Giffords was shot, and six people died. I came within a whisker of being at that Safeway that morning.
It’s ugly. If the pain, suffering, and destroyed lives doesn’t bother The Other Side, they as taxpayers ought to be outraged as I am at paying for preventable medical and disability costs. Eight died in New York City on Halloween, and that day the president wanted to end the diversity lottery program. Fifty-eight died in Las Vegas a month ago, and he offered no suggestions. The next night, three died in Thornton, Colorado by a shooter who walked into Wal-Mart, fired, and walked out. One tragedy gets a snap judgment, and the other is ignored: Americans have a right to as many guns as they want with absolutely no restriction. It is time right now to discuss control of terrorists in our cities. NYPD had already contacted 147 businesses who rented trucks to be on the look out for potential misuse. It’s also time to discuss some form of gun control, like repealing the second amendment, which would not prevent sane people from owning a firearm. It won’t happen, of course.
The statement that we don’t remember what happened to those who were injured is not new. Many in World War II had shell shock and were never the same. After Korea and Vietnam, we changed the name to TBI or PTSD. After Iraq and Afghanistan we started seeing people with no limbs and more PTSD that couldn’t be treated well, because we don’t have a good treatment for it. That alone should be enough to think long and hard about going to war, because in war not only do people die but at least ten times as many get PTSD. We should have more diplomats and fewer tweets, instead of the opposite.
War is so bad that people repress it. My brother never spoke about Vietnam other than a vague memory about being on a helicopter going somewhere. I hike with a Vietnam combat vet who once made the comment, “after I was blown up….” which is the most he ever said about his service other than the single word, “Hué,” which told me enough. When we go to war, we ought to realize that the cost in lives will be far more than we anticipate. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to war. Not at all. But we ought to ask why we are fighting, what we want to achieve, and at what point it’s time to leave—totally leave. Like PTSD or vegetative states, there are political states that just can’t be fixed, and trying to fix them is like trying to fix a vegetative state by physical therapy. It accomplishes nothing and costs a lot of heartache and money.
I end with another form of PTSD and abuse, eloquently put in a letter in The New Yorker. The writer was raped, weekly, for four years, beginning at age 10, by one of the elders in her church. She actually complained and was told she was crazy. Who, after all, believes a ten year-old? She repressed her feelings for years, because nobody would take the word of a girl over a good Christian man who was a pedophile (something else not treatable, other than mandatory avoidance of children). The fact that the woman’s own daughter is now ten brought back unpleasant memories. What stuck with me were her comments, “Others had to have known, but they didn’t think he’d do it to one so young.”
Those who have managed to make a decent life for themselves in spite of horrors they have suffered speaks volumes about the human spirit and to those individuals themselves. It also speaks to the need for each us who is able to try to prevent such harm from occurring in the first place. While it is reassuring to know that many obstacles may be overcome, it would be a lot better not to have such obstacles at all.
Tags: General writing, Philosophy
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