KNOWING WHAT TO DO

One of the reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing was personal and practical.  Many people, having just seen legs blown off, realized that some of the people there knew they must prevent those victims from bleeding out in minutes and saw that people knew how to do it and did not hesitate to improvise and apply tourniquets.  A lot of them were medical people, emergency responders, cops with basic training, and so on who were there to tend the runners or were runners themselves .  Some of those present, not knowing what to do, promised themselves that they would learn how to help grievously hurt people.

This is not the same kind of reaction as those who respond to school shooting by trying to pass laws about guns or mental problems.  It is something specific and individual that THEY can do.  In the city people get used to calling some delegated -- even professional -- coping person to deal with trouble.   They call 911 on their cell phone.  In the country and small towns people do what they can on the spot.  They are used to physical work, they may handle big animals or big dangerous machines, and they deal with emergencies well.  It’s harder for them to figure out what to do with paper systems like grants for the renewal of hundred-year-old sewer systems, so then they stand back.  

Among the websites I’ve happened upon -- or maybe I was looking for without realizing -- is www.goodmenproject.com.    The founders say, “Guys today are neither the mindless, sex-obsessed buffoons nor the stoic automatons our culture so often makes them out to be. Our community is smart, compassionate, curious, and open-minded; they strive to be good fathers and husbands, citizens and friends, to lead by example at home and in the workplace, and to understand their role in a changing world.”  I found the website on Twitter first.  I’m a very bad Twitter user -- I hate all this social chitchat stuff, I hate being forced into categories, I hate having people prescribe stuff to me, I hate sophomoric arguments.  I never tweet. This is different.

For instance, this post struck me, so to speak:  www.menproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-embracing-destruction/  It’s by a guy who teaches stage combat explaining why it was so hard for his urban educated acting students to learn it.  They were gentle, thoughtful, hip guys who avoided all violence and therefore didn’t know how to be forceful, had never taught their own muscles the kind of control needed when coming up against force.  They were wimpy, soft, couch-dwellers who thought about life instead of living.  Harsh?  Well, read it and see what you think.  We’re not talking about gang-bangers here.  We’re talking about guys who need to know how to read adversaries, block them, make and take controlled swings and impacts.

Here’s another story:  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/marriage-20-tips-for-men-on-supporting-a-partner-with-chronic-pain/  This man’s wife was in a car accident that left her in chronic pain.  I know people in this situation and how debilitating it can be, how helpless you are, what a temptation it is to draw away.  But this guy stayed and figured out what would help, partly by doing the obvious thing: asking.  He learned how to anticipate a spike in suffering, what small moves and physical contacts worked, what supplies to have on hand.  This is not to say that what he figured out with his own wife would work with anyone else, because everyone is wired differently and has different damage.  Except that paying close attention and looking for small interventions helped both of them.  I cannot think of a better illustration of intimacy.  Physical intimacy, but not sex.

Here’s a real biggie:  http://truckersagainsttrafficking.org  The website teaches truck drivers what to do when they see kids forced to prowl truck stops in order to turn tricks.  It offers wallet cards with a hotline number:   1-800-373 -7888.  (Now you can make your own wallet card -- since you only need the number.)  This is what to do: CALL.  It tells you what information to scribble down: descriptions of girls and their transportation, license numbers, times.  It tells you what NOT to do -- like try to rescue the girls personally, drive off with them, confront the pimps with a tire iron.  The idea is not to be the kind of hero that gets himself put in jail and unable to find another trucking job -- the idea is to be part of a network of heroes, and also to internalize norms, what good guys should do.  No dithering, no shrinking.  No trying not to see, no compartmenting it into something that’s always there and can’t be stopped.  The Internet has made a major difference since many truckers carry computers and are online.  They often have smart phones that can take photos and transmit them instantly. 

As I type there is someone using the tiny grass Valier airport to practice touch-and-go landings -- that is, they aren’t staying on the ground very long, just coming and going because that’s the tricky part demanding practice.  Finding what to do about big risky stuff is something like that.  I mean, the need comes along and presents itself, and if you're prepared, then doing it teaches you about yourself as well as “how to do it.”  One of the lessons is that you CAN learn how -- once you think to find out about it. 

The good men that I’m missing in this website conversation are the Native Americans.  I know a lot of them around here: all ages, all styles, some of them online.  I’m writing about this website on my blog in part to alert them that they ought to be posting advice about how to be a good Indian man, how to help a reservation kid (besides sending him mittens at Christmas), how to have a conversation with your college roommate who turns out to be an Indian.  People want to help one another and to do the right thing, but they could use some instruction.  There are enough instructions online about how to make a pressure cooker bomb.  Not enough about how to survive the social and economic pressure cooker of human interaction.

Several commenters have said it was striking that when the bombs went off in Boston at the marathon, people ran TOWARD the location, not away in self-protection.  Of course, some of them were emergency responders who were trained to do that, but others were not.  Many people were grievously wounded and needed intervention immediately -- not fancy stuff, but just hands-on attention like those tourniquets on the stumps of blown-off legs.  The helpers literally took the shirts off their backs.  The on-the-spot helpers with no training learned from those who had it.  This is the opposite of stigma, which makes people leave, hide, preserve their own protection.  We can all learn more about what to do, so we can save each other.