Heroes Make A Difference

Reneita Smith of College Park, Maryland isn’t just dedicated to the kids she drives to school, she cares for them like her own. When the school bus full of 20 elementary school children Smith was driving suddenly caught fire yesterday afternoon, Smith’s only concern was making sure that each and every child in her care was off that bus and safe. 

According to Smith, an illuminated brake light indicator was the first indication that something wasn’t right. Neighbors who saw the incident said they saw flames coming from the wheels of the bus. When Smith realized the bus was on fire, she didn’t even hesitate over what to do. “I opened my door, took off my seat belt, and I got my babies off that bus,” she told NBC. Smith went back into the flaming bus repeatedly until all 20 students were off the bus. A neighbor herded the children into a nearby yard a safe distance away. Then, just to be sure everyone was accounted for, Smith went back into the bus. “I ran back onto the bus to make sure that every seat was clear,” she said.

From here.

One person's bravery can make all the difference between an epic tragedy and a merely bad day. Of course, in an ideal world, school buses wouldn't suddenly catch on fire and make it necessary for someone to be a hero to avoid a tragedy.

Knowledge Creates Heroes; Ignorance Creates Victims

2 teen boys in Pennsylvania are being hailed as heroes after they halted a kidnapping on their bikes. Temar Boggs and his friend recognized Jocelyn Rojas’ face from her 'missing' posters just hours after she’d been abducted off her front lawn. The teens were quick to chase Rojas down, and the little girl is now safe with her family.

Law enforcement, perhaps due to its para-military character, loves to keep the public in the dark about active investigations.  But, sharing information with the public converts the public into an army of potential heroes from an army of potential victims.

Spontaneous Group Heroism

Security footage from China captured the swift and effective coordination of a group of bystanders to save a pedestrian who was run over by a van and then trapped under by tipping the van over the free the victim.

China isn't unique.  Something similar happened not so long ago in Western Pennsylvania where motorists who witnessed a semi wipe out with its driver trapped in his cab, teetering on the brink of disaster on the edge of a cliff, formed a human chain to rescue him.

Surprisingly often, heroism involves the coordination of people with very weak ties to each other working together, rather than a single individual saving the day.

Attempted Murder By Spreadsheet In Michigan

On February 11, [firefighter Ryna] McCuen walked into this: a mother at wit's end, a bedridden 18-year-old on a ventilator, his emergency battery power soon running out, and electricity to the home cut off by the local power company. . . . 

It started as a routine call in Michigan for Clinton Township's Engine 5, a "nonemergency medical" as firefighters call it. 

What they found in the living room of this suburban Detroit double-wide mobile home was Troy Stone, who suffers Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a particularly debilitating variation of the muscle-wasting disease. Stone, who has limited movement of his limbs and is no longer able to breathe on his own, had a tracheotomy last December. His family has struggled financially, and they had fallen behind on payments to the local utility.

Christy Stone, Troy's mother, said their electric bill has gone up threefold since Troy had the breathing tube inserted. It now takes seven machines, all running on electricity, to keep him alive.

Despite having a letter from their doctor's office informing DTE Energy that "there must be electrical power in the home to maintain ... life support equipment," the power was still cut off.

"They said it wasn't the doctor's signature on it, it was the nurse's signature on it. So they said it was denied," an exasperated Christy Stone said. Nearly in tears, Stone described how she pleaded with the DTE representative to keep the power on: "How can you deny somebody that's on life support? So I did everything that I could and they just ... it's just messed up."

At first, a spokesperson for DTE Energy called the situation "unfortunate" and commended the "firefighter for his actions." However, citing privacy concerns, the spokesperson declined to discuss specifics of the Stones' case except to say "we are continuing to work with the family to ensure this situation doesn't reoccur and have referred their case ... to partnering agencies for assistance."

On Friday the utility issued an updated statement.

"This is a very unfortunate situation that we are working to rectify immediately," DTE said. "We will be working with this customer to get her the assistance she needs, which is the normal process we follow when our customers are faced with challenges in paying their bills. And we will be donating to the preferred charity of the generous and selfless firefighter who stepped up."

McCuen, a 7½ year veteran of the fire department, heard Stone on the phone with DTE and said his choice became clear. "He had about three hours of battery life," McCuen said. "He needed to be plugged back in. So it seemed obvious what the solution was, that they needed their bill paid."

Christy Stone was astonished at the matter-of-factness of this firefighter she didn't even know.

"Ryan was standing there and he looks at me and goes, 'I'm going to pay your electric bill,' and I was just like -- are you serious!?"

He was, and he did.

Snapping a picture of her bill, McCuen paid it, all $1,023.76 of it.

From CNN.

Fortunately, the firefighter had his priorities straight. And, honestly, the guy who actually shut off the power probably had no clue what was at stake when he did so, following orders from headquarters.

The really culpable parties are the bureaucrats at the electric company who rejected the request, that person's managers, and the executives and directors who put the policy in place that the bureaucrat was implementing.  They, collectively, are guilty of attempted murder over a $1,023.76 debt.

The law doesn't authorize the use of deadly force to prevent or punish a non-violent theft of that amount, and certainly doesn't authorize putting someone's life in peril over an unpaid debt when that is the natural and foreseeable result of its actions that the Stone family had clearly given the electric company knowledge of in a credible way.

Of course, at a deeper level, there is also something profoundly wrong with the fact that our society allows a child's ill health to push a family into poverty as our society did in the case of the Stones.

Recalling A Personal Hero Of Mine

Tilly Smith is probably in college now.  She continues to be one of my personal heroes for something she did when she was ten that is a model for us all.  There is really nothing new to say that I didn't say back in 2005, so read the previous post.  But, some heroes are so amazing that they should never be forgotten.  Tilly Smith is one of those heroes.

In hindsight, what did 9-11 mean?

Ten years later what are the enduring legacies of 9-11?

The heroism of the crew of Flight 93 and the first responders who rushed into a burning skyscraper. The Afghan War that is still with us, and for twisted reasons particular to the misguided mindset of George W. Bush, the Iraq War. The marginalization of the Taliban, the death of Osama bin Laden (followed just weeks later by the only dimly related deaths of many members of the unit that killed him, shot down from a helicopter over Afghanistan), the deaths of at least half a dozen people claimed to be al-Queda number twos. New skyscsrapers are under construction to replace the old ones at ground zero.

The intelligence community budget has soared to $80 billion a year and probably hundreds of thousands of people working in it. We have the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act (which doesn't actually say what popular culture believes it does, the more controversial parts of the war on terror go far beyond the Patriot Act), a chilling and dubious extraordinary rendition and enemy combatant doctrine and the thin lingering doctrinal commitment to those doctrines carried over by President Obama in the absence of Congressional support at Guantanmo Bay, dark plots of torture and abuse in secret cells where waterboarding was conducted and prisoners died from abuse and in the humiliation of Abu Grahib prison in Iraq - although the secret terror prison network and regime of torture was far smaller when real information came out that most on both sides had assumed. We have the continue legal black hole that is Baghram Airforce Base in Afganistan. We have an evolving military concept of targeted killings by drones that General Petraeus has been appointed as head of the CIA to manage.

We have the surprising fact that the last decade has not been riddled with terrorist acts related to 9-11 in the United States. We have new air travel security (we've just shed a decade of useless security level color codes) of dubious value and the TSA - the largest expansion of the federal government civilian workforce in recent memory. We have a variety of federal grant purchased law enforcement resources that were ill accounted for, are all over the United States and have negligable relationships to real terrorism. We have a lot of good scholarship that shows that neither military tribunals or torture are effective in dealing with terrorism and a lot of bad politics that is ignoring that scholarship.

Ten years later, the ominous threat of "Islamo-Fasicism" has been undermined by a wave of democratic reform across most of the Islamic world. It is not complete, but it is there. Ten years later, we still haven't come to terms with the fact that Saudi Arabia has very little to recommend it as an ally and is at the heart of the violent extremism that threatens global human rights and peace. Ten years later we still don't collective understood what experts have been saying all alone - that opposition to Americans and the West in the Islamic world has as much to do with our support with authoritarian Islamic regimes as it does to do with American support for Israel. We have forgotten the soft power that comes from support for democracy, liberty and justice for all.

We mourn the 9-11 dead and the roughly equal number who have died in military adventuries seen by those who advanced them as avenging it. The litigation arising out of 9-11 itself is pretty much concluded and left little more than a ripple of impact. The Pentagon building has been restored to almost its prior incarnation. Tom Clancy, who wrote books predicting terrorist attacks similar in targets, methods and national consciousness impact to 9-11 managed to escape any finger pointing. The military itself has had to refocus from Cold War style conflicts to asymmetric threats, a task that it has not taken to gracefully, exacting an immense toll in treasure with its strategic indecision.

The Iraq War has come and it has also gone. Support for continued involvement at current levels in Afghanistan is waning. Early decisive victories in both wars quickly evolved into prolonged counterinsurgencies.

The world changed, but not as much as we might have expected.

Gurkhas Still Bad Ass

The Gurkhas are soldiers from the Nepal, some of whom provide units in the militaries of India and Britain. They have a reputation was being elite. It appears to be deserved.

Retiring Gurkha Soldier Saves Woman from Being Raped, Uses Large Knife to Fend off Gang of 40 Knife– and Sword-Wielding Robbers (Killing 3 and Injuring 8)

From here citing this story.

Some accounts but the number of attackers as low as fifteen, but some accounts say they had guns.

The Martial Race concept attached to Gurkha and other ethnicities by the British also provides some insight into the workings of 19th century European imperalist racism outside the more familiar contexts of either slavery or the Third Reich.

Law Student Heroes

A group of SUNY Buffalo law students helped save their law profs life, getting him to a local hospital.

Honor and Engineers

It's not our duty to die for our country, it's our job to make them die for their's.

-General Patton

Soldiers often win prestigous medals for doing brave things that save their buddies lives and get them killed. This war has been no exception.

Consider Navy SEAL Marc A. Lee, who was awarded a Silver Star posthumously for the events in Iraq that led to his August 2, 2006 death:

Petty Officer Lee and his SEAL element maneuvered to assault an unidentified enemy position. He, his teammates, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks engaged enemy positions with suppressive fire from an adjacent building to the north.

To protect the lives of his teammates, he fearlessly exposed himself to direct enemy fire by engaging the enemy with his machine gun and was mortally wounded in the engagement. His brave actions in the line of fire saved the lives of many of his teammates.

Army Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith won a Medal of Honor posthumously for doing something quite similar on April 4, 2003 near the Baghdad International Airport in Iraq:

Fearing the enemy would overrun their defenses, Sergeant First Class Smith moved under withering enemy fire to man a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged armored personnel carrier. In total disregard for his own life, he maintained his exposed position in order to engage the attacking enemy force. During this action, he was mortally wounded. His courageous actions helped defeat the enemy attack, and resulted in as many as 50 enemy soldiers killed, while allowing the safe withdrawal of numerous wounded soldiers.

Both men deserve to be remembered as heros. But, both of their deaths also owe a great deal to sloppy engineers in the defense industrial complex.

Large .50 caliber machine guns should be designed so that using them doesn't directly expose the operator to enemy fire requiring the operator to disregard his or her own life to use them. The whole point of a .50 caliber machine gun is to allow the operator to mow down large numbers of armed people who want to kill you and your unit, and may greatly outnumber you. This makes the operator a natural target for enemy fire. Yet, too often, these weapons were designed with little or no protection for the operator, and the predictable result was that the United States was left with a few more heros. Unsurprisingly, for example, the guy most likely to get killed in a tank crew in Iraq has been the guy whose job it is to operate the machine gun outside its armored shell, a post not provided with a gunner's shield until well into the war, when upgrade kits were provided.

Heroism is a fine and honorable thing when it is necessary. But, the point of war isn't to display heroism. It is to get the job done. Frequently, the flip side of heroism is the bad planning or bad engineering that made that heroism necessary. Almost every Silver Star or Medal of Honor is a testament to somebody else's big mistake of some kind or another.

Determination v. Brawn

Sometimes determination beats brawn. Case in point. The fifteen pound cat that chased a black bear up a tree.

While the fact isn't well known, house cats are incredibly effective predators, and one of the leading causes of extinction worldwide.

Observation of free-ranging domestic cats shows that some individuals can kill over 1000 wild animals per year, although smaller numbers are more typical. . . . Recent research [10] suggests that rural free-ranging domestic cats in Wisconsin may be killing between 8 and 217 million birds each year. The most reasonable estimates indicate that 39 million birds are killed in the state each year. Nationwide, rural cats probably kill over a billion small mammals and hundreds of millions of birds each year. Urban and suburban cats add to this toll. . . .

Worldwide, cats may have been involved in the extinction of more bird species than any other cause, except habitat destruction. Cats are contributing to the endangerment of populations of birds such as Least Terns, Piping Plovers and Loggerhead Shrikes. In Florida, marsh rabbits in Key West have been threatened by predation from domestic cats. Cats introduced by people living on the barrier islands of Florida's coast have depleted several unique species of mice and woodrats to near extinction.

As another example, house cats have wiped out many New Zealand's many native bird species (see also here and many of Australia's native marsupial species (but see an opposing view here). The case of cat v. bear shows why this is true.