This particular post is not delusional at all really. Maybe a little overly specific on a relatively minor and rare problem. Nevertheless it needs to be posted somewhere.
Basically if you have ever read stories of death by crowd you know the value of what I am going to propose – Eye witness accounts of being forced beyond ones control to step over or on lifeless or even still living bodies, completely unable to do anything about it other than try your damnedest to not slip down.
Now what if there was a universal distress signal that consisted of a hand straight up in the air and shaped into an easily recognizable sign. Instead of having no recourse to the body underfoot problem aside from trying to yell over likely very loud music or just more loud yelling, someone could raise their distress signal instead. Almost certainly the people near you who also have encountered the injured/dead/dying person would also raise their hands and now you have a small group of people who at the very least demand the attention of the people around them and can presumably both offer the inch or 2 of space they have to offer which maybe is enough to let the person get back up or they can be informed of the problem and also raise their hands garnering the attention and aid of their neighbors as well. Reasonably quickly a decent group of people could have their hands up and, given a grave enough emergency and a correspondingly large amount of hands in the air, the band if there is one would likely take notice and could stop playing and could mediate through the PA system. The other scenario would be that a single person needing help or a group containing an injured person could face away from the band or source of the crowds attention and use the hand signal to let people know that they need to be let out of the crowd. This second scenario would actually be helpful in a lot of ways to the much more dire first because it would be much more common and therefore its more frequent use would familiarize people with the meaning of the hand signal.
The one potential flaw of this system would be that the hand sign gets used to the point of meaninglessness. I don’t really see this happening but it is possible and one defense against that would be to make the signal awkward and lame enough that people would not really want to use it except in an emergency. The other tool to help avoid this is to explicitly promote this as meaning an injury has occurred. Not I’m sick or my boyfriend is ignoring me and I want to leave but that there is something important going on and it demands your attention and respect. The other flaw I guess would be that not enough people know what the sign means but, considering the amount of money insurers and concert promoters have staked to people not dieing at their shows, not to mention the bands who have actually had the terrible experience of this happening during a performance, one can imagine that there is a large group of well funded and listened to people who would be very happy to see something like this gain cultural viability.
My Proposal is that it should be the 3 main fingers splayed outward with the thumb holding the pinky finger down. This configuration is easily recognizable from a distance, can be illustrated well on posters, is uncomfortable and dumb enough looking that its flagrant use would likely be restrained. Also it, somewhat cornily but helpfully, is actually a reverse OK sign which could help in the public education and word spreading.
Of course there are many other situation besides in large crowds where a non-verbal readily available and easily seen and understood distress signal could be useful, so yeah.
Hand signal to indicate an injury in a crowd
