"We Might Save Somebody's Life"
Earlier: Good Journalism Saves Lives
When I was about 14 something rather major happened. It's memorable enough; I still remember all the details, just not the exact ages (at the time). I still thought a lot about it after I had left for school and in days/weeks to come. It would become somewhat of a "dark cloud" in the neighbourhood for years to come. It was an unspoken thing; unspeakable almost.
The neighbour (adjacent home, right next to ours) kept beating up his wife. She was screaming for help; she was in pain (it woke me up, it woke everybody up). My father, who is about as big as me, decided that he has a social imperative to go there and intervene. At the end it ended up with shouting and the wife beater trying to reach out for a knife in the kitchen. My dad was thankfully not stabbed. He may have saved a life.
Not too long afterwards (maybe about a year later) the wife beater killed himself. It was not done in a "decent" fashion. In the middle of the night he hung himself in the staircase. His young daughter, maybe under 10 at the time, saw her dad dangling. Everyone was shouting. My dad ran there and tried to give him CPR (the same person who earlier in the year or a year before wanted to stab him). He really tried to give him CPR, which he was qualified and trained to do. But it was too late. He just kept vomiting and by the time the ambulance came it was too late already. His life could not be saved. There were several kids in the house; one of them was about my age and the eldest daughter was about to (imminently) get married, so to her it was very painful that he chose to do this, even in his own home. To the much younger girl it was scarring and traumatising. That's not difficult to understand; she'll never heal from that.
To me, the lesson from all this was, even if it's risky to intervene when domestic abuse is happening, there's a moral duty to do something. "Not my business" isn't a good excuse and phoning the police may mean too much time passes and by the time cops arrive it's already too late.
In recent years I did my best to protect women from predators, including some from Microsoft. If I need to pay a price for it, so be it. It's the right thing to do.
At the end of the day, when people die (everyone dies, eventually) they won't be judged by their bank balance but by their deeds. So I follow the example of my father. █