“The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.”
“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days
Like most people, last Summer I followed the news of the huge bushfires in Australia. Volunteer bushfire fighters are often described as “heroic”, and for a good reason. They run towards a bushfire; at the same time, most of us are sensibly running away.
I would use another adjective – selfless. When he returned to his home, the owner found a note on the kitchen bench from the Urunga NSW Rural Fire Service:
Whilst that note tells you all you need to understand the selfless attitude of the volunteers (It was our pleasure to save your home…), for me, that note also tells more about the Lake Wobegon Effect, a well-recognised social/psychology classification: an illusory superiority complex, the human tendency to overstate our abilities and accomplishments without the evidence to back it up. It was named after the American radio series, A Prairie Home Companion set in a fictitious small-town Lake Wobegon in Minnesota. The volunteer fighters reflect the opposite of the Lake Wobegon Effect.
However, after my stroke, I also noticed that brain injured survivors are also often described in the media as “heroic”. For a long time, I thought that they must have achieved something heroic to get that media attention. That is fine, I certainly know many survivors battling for their lives with their injury. Nevertheless, the adjective – heroic – being used for brain injured survivors disturbs me in a way that the description did not for volunteers.
It began when I met a man at a support group in a hospital that I attended for brain injured patients, maybe a year or so after my stroke. He proudly wore a tee-shirt with a could-not-miss message – Stroke Survivor Hero. I was uneasy and confused by that tee-shirt. Why the word hero? Our teacher complimented the tee-shirt, which confused me even more, but since she was the teacher, and I was the confused student, I assumed she knew what she was saying. That man must have been exceptionally heroic to earn his special tee-shirt. So, I accepted it and forgot about it.
Until the last Summer bushfires, when again I heard the deserved adjective “hero” used a lot to describe the volunteer fighters, and of course, I remembered the Stroke Survivor Hero tee-shirt. It still truly bothered me. How did that guy deserve that tee-shirt? I had spent ten hours with him in that group, and he seemed to be not much different than the rest of us, and no one was about to arrange a parade for me. I thought, heroic compared to whom? And some envy – how can I also become a hero for surviving my stroke?
More importantly, and likely the source of my uneasiness, is why do people judge stroke survivors as heroic, and if not, are we then second-rate survivors? Or did the teacher considers going to her lessons as an act of heroism. Because I can tell you why I was there – I had private medical insurance and I was harangued to use it. To think of myself as heroic is the Lake Wobegon Effect, to overstate my accomplishments.
In the last post, I wrote: If you want to get the true meaning of the show, pay attention to the closing words of News From Lake Wobegon, a signature sign-off phrase delivered with a lot of sarcasm: “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”
So as the Lake Wobegon Effect informs us, not all brain injured survivors are heroes. Remember, that hero description is usually made by the media – heroic, courageous, brave et al. But does that devalue those who do not reach that heroic stature? What happens when a stroke survivor deliberately chooses to expose their pain about their disability, and thus depart from the accepted path to be media-worthy heroic, which seems to mean having a worthy adversity faced with resilience and individualism. I have to tell you, I want to stand with the ones who expose themselves after a brain injury, and risk standing alone for revealing the truth of their feelings.
I know people with an acquired brain injury have learned that it is not always in their self-interest to expose their pain, as later they can regret it when their real pain turns into becoming a pain in the arse for others. Or worse, labelled as self-pitying, a term I absolutely loathe. I think some people prefer to watch an actor playing a person with a disability from a comfortable seat in a cinema. And then, over a coffee and cake after the movie, discuss what they have felt about the disability – rather than feel the real pain of a person with a disability. It is like going around to the back of a house when the front door is open.
At Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor notes, “Residents feel uneasy at momentous events.” And at Lake Wobegon, they prefer their heroes to be self-contained; self-reliant; self-enabling (unless you need your snow shovelled, that is perfectly fine).
Here is in Strokesville, we like to go through the front door, even when it is locked. As Minnesotan Bob Dylan said, “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”