Saving a life

Don't forget this: All over the world, many more human lives are being saved every day than are being destroyed.

Media coverage does not reflect this. Honestly, how could they? Put a Lives Saved Today ticker on the website of your favorite hospital or ambulance service? The moment you did that, someone - like us - would  ask why those lost are not mentioned.
So, other than for high-profile cases which make good TV footage or press coverage, forget about it. 

Then there is the complex aspect of causality, cause and effect attached to each other in an understandable, verifiable way.

If someone near you starts to scratch their face, their arms, and red blotches and blisters multiply, you call 911 or take the person to the emergency room. There, a smiling doctor may tell you you have just saved a life.

If a house is on fire and you run in to grab a child, that's even more straightforward.

Charitable giving is one major way to help save lives, but even tiny, everyday events can do it. You may never know if a stroll in a park interrupted a mugging that would have turned deadly.

Or it may take a decade or two to see the positive consequences of an action. But since innumerable events happen in a decade, it would very likely be a mistake to draw a straight line and assign credit.

Although such a line, as straight as the path of a bullet, that's to say straight enough, may exist in rare cases. When a French civil servant introduced himself to a ranking official at the Algerian embassy in Paris, that official emphatically shook the hand of the Frenchman and said, I am so pleased to meet you, I had you in the sights of my rifle many times.
This referred to the war in Algeria, where the Frenchman had served in the French army, but in such a manner that the local insurgents spared his life time and again.

Closer to home, much less dangerous and also very ambiguous, there is a story told by a friend. The friend had talked to a buddy and mentioned the intention to go and buy a new powerful computer. A week later, the buddy showed up, try this. After checking out the computer, the friend asked why there were data and why the machine tried to connect to a certain network. Is that stolen? I'll check. The friend refused the machine but did not contact the police. The next time he saw the buddy, the latter said yes, it fell off a truck. The incident was never mentioned again, and the buddy continued to be a normal, well liked member of the community. I thought hard about it, the friend explained, and then decided ruining someone's life over a couple of thousand dollars of hardware was not what I wanted to live with. In case you disagree with the assessment, the friend added, I returned the favor later, when someone cheated me out of a good amount of money. I went easy on the cheater because he had a family with small children.