she's a little hard on herself. She claimed the ideas her husband came up with were not particularly inventive and the same she'd come up with had she been helping a friend
Yet, when she told her friends, they did NOT suggest such actions. They too felt like there was nothing that could be done.
Rather I'd posit that the actions the husband did seemed obvious to the author in hindsight, and that not everyone would easily identify those kinds of actions. We are used to hearing narratives that people in other countries are relatively untouchable (eg scams), so there's already a kind of learned helplessness there.
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