On the other side of town a woman is being beaten. It’s been going on for over a month.The whole town knows about it, in fact it’s all over the news with pictures of her injuries, videos of her assaults and tales of her heroic fight to stay alive. The townspeople send her meals, praise her resistance, and supply Raine—that’s her name—with helmets and gloves for defense. 

The man committing the assault, Russ, became fabulously wealthy through corruption. He owns a host of businesses that provide the town with essentials such as heating oil and gasoline. Plus, he has an enormous supply of TNT and plastic explosives. He says he’ll blown up anyone who intervenes, but then he and his fathers before him fine-tuned intimidation and mendacity to an art. He claims Raine is his wife and that she is bound to him by God, history and nature—not that he cares about God; he simply uses the manipulation.

Some of my neighbors claim that the woman has low morals. She is of little value to the town and perhaps, because of her manner of dress and history of doing anything for a price, she is getting what she deserves. If she had joined the Westside Enterprise and Social Team, they would feel compelled to come to her assistance as an alliance with far greater power and resources than Russ possesses. She had wanted to join, but her tarnished virtue made the board of directors resist. Raine had been married to Russ in the past and finally, years after the divorce, was courting other men in the WEST. It was only when some of the board expressed willingness to accept her that Russ decided to take her back. He cuts and shoots her, trying to force her to submit. She pleads for a knife and a gun for defense. She asks for a lock, a roof, a wall. The committee refuses, thinking these steps will provoke Russ into attacking them. Cowards.

I live in the richest part of our village. Our councilman, Joe, is an old character (whose intemperate son, by the way, had dalliances with Raine, which simply amuses me but is of no consequence in this matter.) He talks about standing up to bullies when he’s on camera, but he is more frightened by Russ than almost anyone else. He and other townsfolk have ceased doing business with Russ for the most part, but not completely. Russ has them over a barrel, so to speak, since homes would grow cold and trucks would stand idle if they stopped buying his fuel. Old Joe and many other leaders of WEST sound like they simply want Raine to surrender, allow Russ to possess her and have his way. Then they can go back to fretting about the weather a hundred years in the future over champagne and caviar.

Fear is a losing strategy, as is any emotion. For me, it’s not the heart-breaking images of destruction and woe but the knowledge that history teaches us that tyrants must be stopped with the tool they use, force. Otherwise, their appetites are never sated. They continue their rampage until they conquer all or die or are stopped. 

In my prime I was a physician. I saw that the patients sho showed up with an emergency got the doctor on duty at that moment. If they were very bad off and were lucky to get one that was excellent, they might survive. If they were unlucky and the doctor was sub-par, they didn’t. Life, as we all know, is not fair, despite our human compassion to make it so. Raine has the council in the WEST that exists: risk averse, indecisive and pusillanimous. Perhaps Russ knew this when he attacked or maybe he didn’t care. Their wishful thinking that a surgeon can fix her up afterwards and that a good attorney can enforce the divorce later, when the devastation ends will lead to her death. It’s not like we haven’t read this tale in history books over and over again.k