He is helpless because the system inhibits him from imparting his version of the truth.
Instead of investing in local infrastructure and training, many NGOs have arrived during the time of crisis, completed their work, and left, leaving local systems helpless on their own against future outbreaks.
It's a brutal reality, but in the Internet age, piracy runs rampant and those without a legal support system are helpless to the plans of sleazy corporations hungry for ideas.
Even with the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown Tunnels remaining open Monday night, it was clearly the transportation system's most helpless day.
As an added bonus for the curious, the biology is absolutely fascinating: while normally free-living, the bacteria that cause chronic UTI (such as E. coli) have evolved ways to physically invade the cells lining the bladder, taking up residence inside those cells and entering a sort of dormancy where antibiotics and the immune system are largely helpless.
Others are disillusioned by the rigidities and inefficiencies of the system and feel helpless to change it.
Women, who previously would have felt helpless, now had a support system, which they could access in case of violence or denial of food.
In the late 19th century, the heyday of the hysteria diagnosis, it was seen as the female complaint par excellence -- and not because anxious women might plausibly be rebelling in one of the only ways they could, by incapacitating themselves for their duties, but because they were assumed to be the helpless victims of their reproductive systems.
Nowadays, system designers are somewhat helpless during the first stages of the design process (definition of the organic architecture during the top down stage of the "V" cycle).
We keep thinking we are helpless in the face of a system that is off the rails.
