We Are A Sick People
When a person's life ends in tragedy, caring people express condolences. Some say, "I'm so sorry to hear that," or "My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family."
We might wrestle internally with what death means, it's finality and resolute nature. Thoughts about our mortality will disturb our peace and make us consider what it would mean for those we love who we will leave behind.
All of that is true until the CEO of a healthcare company is assassinated in cold blood by a well-heeled killer whose demography doesn't lend itself to a criminal profile.
Or, until a trained military veteran strangulates to death a 100-pound mentally ill man on a New York subway.
In both cases, the public has divided into separate camps: those who believe ending a life is warranted and those who are aghast at the weird bloodlust and politicization of lost lives.
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Let's start with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. As he arrived at an early morning business meeting, a masked man with a gun, silencer, and malice popped up behind him and pulled the trigger. One minute, Thompson was seeing the hotel's entry; the next moment, the world went dark.
The widespread social media discussion that followed has been creepy and discomposing. The idea that Thompson "had it coming" because of well-founded public grievances with his company's high rate of claim denials and reliance on AI to deny care is powerful and weak at the same time. It is powerful in that it has intoxicated the moral senses of people who consider themselves good, and it is weak in that nothing about disdain for the U.S. healthcare system justifies this public execution.
Turning Thompson into a meme and saying "sympathy denied" may be the rule of our day, but it's a bad one.
The people cheering this death because of their rightful indignation with a malignant health system are trash humans. Exercising the greatest gifts of my vocabulary fails to call them anything else.
While the political left and the populist right are finding some common ground with their chilly responses to CEO hunting, something similar may be happening with Jordan Neely's death.
Neely, a mentally ill 30-year-old listed on NYC's "top 50" list of at-risk homeless people, perished at the hands of Daniel Penny, who attempted to restrain and prevent Neely from harassing other passengers.
After being acquitted of Neely's murder, Penny told FOX News that he didn't regret the killing. Since then, he's become another contributor to the political right's long love affair with anti-Black vigilantism.
Whereas the left uses the pain and suffering of patients denied care due to the healthcare industry's capitalist greed as justification for Thompson's murder, the right uses the potential pain and suffering of subway riders as justification for Penny to have continued choking Neely even after he went limp.
Both cases expose how each "side" has so tribalized into separate encampments that neither possesses enough basic moral fitness or human decency to resist the cheering murder of their perceived opponent. Both are dying from the death of virtue and metastasizing heartlessness.
Like the patients who refused care from their insurers, Neely, the homeless man, Thompson's wealthy assailant, and Penny, the FOX News darling - we are a sick people. We all need healthcare. All of us.
Murder is wrong.
Sadly, we need that reminder. God help us.
