While I touched on it a bit last week, I think it’s important to share a few thoughts about the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, especially since we know who allegedly shot him.
Apparently the shooter was Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League college graduate who made headlines by killing Thompson in broad daylight.
While the authorities are still trying to piece everything together, the general consensus is that Mangione, radicalized by an apparent spinal injury, decided to jumpstart the revolution by firing the first shot at the CEO of an insurance company that 80 percent of Americans seem to hate.
Of course, you’ve probably seen the hilarious memes of Super Mario’s green clad brother Luigi on the run from the police or being tattled on by grimace at a McDonald’s restaurant. Honestly, the memes have been the best part of all of this, chief among them a dubious tweet from Burger King that read “we don’t snitch.”
However, there’s a darker aspect of the story that needs to be discussed and a generalized warning that everyone from all walks of life ought to heed.
That message is simple. While there are certainly corporations and entities that deserve our ire, so gleefully and quickly jumping to the murder of executives is not a fast track to solving our problems. It is in fact a one way ticket to civil unrest and a revolution that will know no friends if, God forbid, it ever ramps up to full speed.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that insurance and insurance companies have been subject to intense scrutiny over the last decade. One of the biggest ongoing political struggle sessions has been over Obamacare, its pitfalls and what, if anything, can replace it as a superior alternative.
So far, neither political party has had a good answer for this aside from a lot of lip service and loud barking whenever the other side is in power.
Couple this ongoing issue with a terrible economy and all of the typical pitfalls associated with fighting with insurance companies over claims and you have a recipe for a country that is more than willing to spill blood and celebrate those who spill the blood of those involved in these companies.
And indeed, Mangione is being celebrated as something of a new American folk hero who had the courage to do what many of us have entertained for a few moments before coming to our senses whenever companies piss us off.
Of course, the old adage about living by the sword and dying by it happen to be true.
A country that is so quick to shed blood at the drop of a hat will inevitably bleed itself try once bloodletting becomes the norm in a society that has lost its civility.
While there are a lot of people who have a revolutionary mindset and are warm to the idea of revolution for a better and brighter tomorrow, many of us are so divorced from the realities of it that we don’t know what we’re asking for.
Because to endorse and fully embrace bloody revolution is to embrace the end of just about everything we hold sacred. Revolution is no joke and people are going to find very quickly that they are not Mel Gibson in The Patriot but rather the scores of movie extras that he left dead in his wake.
Objectively, the public reaction to Thompson’s murder has been nothing short of fascinating since it has been one of the few brazen public killings that has been met with uncharacteristic support from multiple sides of the political spectrum.
As you might imagine, most of the people on the left are celebrating Thompson’s killing for many of the reasons that you’ve come to expect. That Thompson was the very wealthy CEO of a corporation in a time where the Democratic Party has engaged in open class warfare and “eat the rich” style campaigns, it’s no surprise that there are few tears from that side of the aisle.
In instances such as this, people like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are perhaps the greatest examples of the left’s general feelings on the event. Warren responded to the assassination by saying that you can only push people so far before they take matters into their own hands. Sanders later told NBC news’s Kristen Welker that he understood her position but said that nobody should applaud shooting someone in the back who was a father of two.
In his typical commie fashion, Sanders said that Americans are applauding the shooting because of the incredible profit margins of companies such as UnitedHealthcare without delivering the services it promised.
However, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and just as many centrist and right-wing people happen to agree.
If you check the comments on many of the most staunchly right-wing social media and news outlets you’ll find that just as many people on the right are indifferent about Thompson’s murder as people are passionate about it on the left. What this means is that there is a general feeling of countrywide anger and resentment toward a system that people believe are taking advantage of them.
Frankly, they aren’t wrong about that. However, politicians like Sanders and Warren ought to be especially careful about lending credence to the idea that murder is a justifiable response to bad leadership. After all the nonsense that the Democrats pulled during COVID, just about all of them would be rife for assassination, considering what their policies did to the lives people living under that regime.
But in a civilization society, it ought to be that evolution through legislation, rather revolution, is the appropriate response to bad corporate policy. Believe me, history has shown that the alternative is worse.