Generally, when a stranger is murdered in cold blood, there's at least a muted "Damn shame!' sort of reaction. If a man with a family dies at the age of 50, why, you can certainly say "That's far too young, that poor man's family!" (Not that he was poor--unfortunate, but not poor.) You don't actually see people writing folk songs about the killer and posting them to social media, or see people back out of the search for the killer.
What has happened, if one can at all "read the room", is that the murdered CEO has become a stand-in for a parasitical industry. Our health insurance system isn't a "health care system"--it's a promise to pay for protection. Some of your health care bill will be paid. Not all. Your course of treatment can be affected by your insurance company.
This can and does result in bad (fatal or crippling) outcomes. Of course, people feel some way about that.
And the result of that feeling may look very cold-blooded. It isn't. It's rather hot, actually.
I am a bit of a cynic at times, and we might find out that the killer is not actually a folk hero with a wronged loved one, bankrupted by medical bills or brought to an untimely end by denied claims. Some of the populist "death to the bloated ticks!" sentiment may be inauthentic (people do love a viral bandwagon).
I might suggest that millionaires and billionaires who want to cut Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and veteran's benefits do a significant look around the room, though, themselves. People idly talk about a random "they" that is responsible for why the world is a shitty, shoddily run place where people pay their last nickel for the favor of being shafted. They do it literally all the time.
But sometimes they do figure out that "they" have faces. If you tickle them, they laugh. If you cut them, they bleed, etc.
This is the sort of thinking that sounds like a threat, but I don't think it is. There's a kind of very specific math to it. The kind that isn't exactly written down, but the effects of it are fairly apparent in practice.
2 comments:
In the mortal words of the late troubadour/anarchist Utah Phillips, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
I don't know what to think about this. I do know that under besa we would have to offer food water and transportation for three days. Then we would be anxious for him to leave, before the christians came. In my primitive understanding, he would be considered a fugitive who had committed a murder. We would probably consider it as a revenge killing. We do not condone these types of murders.
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