Given that what I need is arranged each day on
tables beside my bed which raises me up into a sitting position with food and computers close at hand it should come as no
surprise that I make use of those quiet nighttime hours for writing and for
Turner classic movies -- at least those movies which pass the parental controls
established by my Priest.
But even better for my sense of current human community is that the movies are
interspersed, at least in my world, with real life drama about actual
neighbors whose activities get reported by my police scanner. The
police and fire rescue squads in our small town respond each week
to calls for help from elderly men and women who have fallen, sometimes down
the steps to the basement; to attempted suicides by young
people, mostly boys, to reports
of fights and/or domestic violence inside/outside homes and fast food
restaurants and gas stations; and to grass fires started by a car in a ditch,
by hay balers getting too hot and by lightning strikes too close to piles of
bales or to a tree line --- or sometimes the strike just hits the plain old ground, killing nearby livestock.
In between those are calls from the nursing home for assistance in
getting people to the hospital and then from the hospital to the
rescue helicopter or to meet the airplane at the airport or for an
ambulance transport to larger city hospitals for better, more experienced care.
A few days ago there was a call to rescue
a 65-year-old man who had fallen out of the tree he was trimming and was lying
on the ground in, even according to the dispatcher’s carefully worded
description, extreme back pain. But then a dispute broke out between two
neighboring towns over which squad had jurisdiction over this fellow’s farm and
the dispatcher was forced to repeat her distress call to the second town, and
the guy on the ground had to wait a bit longer.
But bad as that was, it’s
probably still better than the comment some guy made on air about the nursing home, saying, “oh we don’t go there anymore in the daytime;
they have their own medical staff.” There was a small silence from the
dispatcher, at that, and then she, after having probably checked with almost anybody
else for a better answer, repeated the call for an ambulance, which was then sent without question. I like to imagine that the fellow who didn't want to go there lost his radio privileges and maybe a lot more than that forever, effective immediately.
We don’t hear names nor do we get much in
the way of ultimate results, but if we ask around we get all the information we could possibly want. These are,
after all, very small towns in a very large county with a total population of
less than 15,000 people. The word gets out.
Once in a while we hear a funeral
notice on the radio and piece it together from the calls for those taken from
nursing homes with unstable stats, extreme weakness or excessive bleeding and
it’s no surprise they might have died. But sometimes they also come back, to resume life. One fellow, somewhat younger than the norm, fell out of a tree and
hit his head on the way down and was in a coma for more than a year, but now he
is walking again and even riding his motorcycle -- not 100% maybe, but better
than it could have been.
Occasionally we get the rest of the story
in a tight-lipped news report about the subject whose distress call we heard on
the scanner who had been pinned under his vehicle after a rollover accident. We knew he had died. We could hear it in the voices of the dispatcher and
the volunteer rescue team, all trying very hard to stick to the numerical script
required for confidentiality in on-air transmissions. But when the speed and
excitement of a possible life saved diminishes into the slowed down sadness of
what’s clearly not possible, they can’t hide it.
Sometimes it’s sad from the start, such as
when a distress call comes in after dark from a witness who has seen a truck
driver beating on his wife and kids in the cabin of the truck in the ditch.
Even the dispatcher called it a case of possible domestic violence with
children involved to give those first on the scene some idea of what they might
find, and true to form, there was very little description of what they did
find, nor was there much about charges or consequences in the subsequent news
cycle.
We who listen, in prayer -- we who
can’t rescue anybody anymore, but can still pray for them -- could well imagine
small children either huddled in a corner inside that truck or hiding in the
cornfield nearby as their mother tried to absorb the abuse for their sake. All that seemed probable in the days following this and
other such incidents is that since no charges were filed and no reported intervention
was offered, the family probably moved on and the vicious drama would most
likely continue until somebody, years hence, grew up enough to fight back for
himself and the others. Of course the old bully could well be the victim himself by then, killed or imprisoned or abandoned in the Alzheimer’s unit, while the children keep on perpetuating his sins upon their own families, kind of in his memory.
And even with all that, it still could be
worse, as it was for the dispatchers and rescuers who answered a call last
winter from a
child begging them to stop her dad from beating on her mom. What they found when they got there though was not just a beating but a knifing, and blood all over the kitchen from the
20 stab wounds which ended the mother’s life. The dad in that case is still in
jail pending a trial for murder and the four children have been taken in by
another family, but the officers involved, and this town, may never be the same.
So that’s kind of my summary verdict from all
these sources of story, from movies to scanner to the news; human nature
without redemption pretty much climbs straight down the ladder into hell, taking
as many others with it as it can. I’m not sure this knowledge is especially good for my own
psycho-social health but it does at least remind me of what I’m not missing by being
widowed, disabled and otherwise isolated: not a thing.
