If it saves just one life…

I became very familiar with that phrase when participating in online debates about guns. It is an odd thing that many of the same people who make the argument that whatever might save one life must be done when advocating gun bans are so scornful of government efforts to give advice on self-protection in the event of disaster. Their scorn is based on the premise that having a supply of bottled water will avail you nothing in a nuclear explosion or catastrophic flood. All it will do, they say, is give you a false sense of security. That is quite true near Ground Zero, but the bottled water could easily make the difference between life and death for some people at the edge of the catastrophe. Why not put some by?

I do not often defend government efforts on anything, but pamphlets on basic precautions seem to me to be a great deal more useful than so much else they do. Cheap per life saved, too. Perhaps that is the problem. The mockers feel that the pamphlets are a substitute for whatever action (which usually means tax-funded government action) they would like to see taken. Could be, could indeed be, but if it saves just one life…

(Way back when I myself used to be very amusing at the expense of a British government pamphlet called Protect and Survive. It said what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Paint your windows white and hide in the cupboard under the stairs, I seem to recall. Ha ha ha if your body is being reduced to its component atoms by a nuclear explosion. But, my present-day self says, sound enough advice if you are at the margins.)

Via John Weidner’s Random Jottings, I found this post from Cold Fury arguing that mockery of the US Homeland Security boss Tom Ridge’s advice on making a survival kit helped create a climate of opinion where preparations that might have saved lives were less likely to be made. Apparently Ridge’s recommendation of duct tape came in for particular ridicule. (Haven’t these people watched Apollo 13?) I must take issue, though, with John Weidner’s use of the word “murderers” to describe the mockers. They were not murderers. They were wilfully, harmfully blind to quite likely possibilities and that is bad enough.

The same point about advice that works sometimes came up in the comments to this Crooked Timber post. One commenter was heavily criticised for saying that people should have walked out of the path of the hurricane. Another commenter replies angrily – and correctly – that a hurricane moves faster than a running man. Once again, it is true to say that for many of the victims attempting to “walk out of it” would be no more than a means of bringing forward their deaths by a few minutes. (A further point made by the commenters is that for able-bodied people to stay to help those too old, too young or too sick to flee is a good act not a bad one.)

Nevertheless. Some people who are dead now would be alive if they had walked early. I do not claim I would have followed my own advice. In his book The Periodic Table, Primo Levi says as an aside that many of his relatives died in the Holocaust because, although they could see things getting worse for the Jews under the fascist regime, they could not summon up the tremendous initiative necessary to emigrate. I felt as soon as I read it that in their place I would have been the same. Probably I would have been the same in the floods too. Probably I would have persuaded myself that the option I wanted to take, staying put, was also the safest – and duly drowned.

But the advice “walk to a safer place” is not always fatuous even if you have left it too late to get right out of the area. Not all places hit by the storm bore its full fury. There are enough stories of people hanging on to trees, rocks or particularly sturdy buildings while seeing the dreadful sight of their less well-situated neighbours being swept away to suggest that some places are definitely safer than others. Even without government instruction it might be beneficial to think about these things in advance.