Humanity Lost
“Guys, defending or justifying shooting a man in the street is a path to hell. Don’t do it.” I posted that on social media and it touched a chord on both sides, getting millions of views and thousands of responses.
I obviously wrote it about the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth. Watching the video of his execution was jarring, like a dystopian scene come to life. It’s stunning to me how many people have taken the side of the killer given how cold-blooded his actions were.
Brian Thompson was the father of two children. Those kids will never see their Dad again.
I’m also sad for Luigi Mangione, a young man radicalized to commit murder who will spend the rest of his life behind bars. A young person becoming a killer is tragic.
Beyond these two lives and families destroyed, I’m sad for what this killing and the reaction to it augur for our society. Amazon has sold over 100,000 green “Luigi” knit hats and the jacket Mangione wore during the shooting has apparently sold out. A demented young man is now an icon to those who feel that the system is rigged against them.
The first step toward violence is regarding others as less human than you are. To some, a wealthy CEO of a health insurance company is no longer a human being worthy of consideration.
Some would make the argument that UnitedHealth prematurely ended thousands of lives through its business practices. A Zoom was leaked that showed the new UnitedHealth CEO saying that his team should ‘ignore the noise’ and that the company’s practices were sound; one can only guess that it was leaked by an employee on the call. But the practices of a company have nothing to do with the right and wrong of gunning a man down. It’s only when people become figures in a morality play rather than flesh and blood humans that atrocities become subject to argument.
Is this killing a sign of things to come? I fear it is. I have looked into the eyes of a person radicalized by social media yelling obscenities on the street. There was no reason or empathy in those eyes – only hatred. They did not regard their ideological opponents as people, but as enemies to be defeated or conquered.
“The most ferocious fight is never good vs. evil,” someone once told me, “but good vs. good.” People feel that their cause is righteous. Righteousness bleeds into protest which in some cases leads to violence. If you are on the side of justice, what side is your enemy on? And what are you willing to do to ensure that your side wins?
I often think that the antidote to what ails us is to see everyone, including our enemies, as human beings with friends and families. It seems obvious, but it’s becoming less and less the norm in American life.
Is it possible to lower the temperature and raise people’s awareness of our shared humanity? We can only hope so, but the winds are blowing the other direction more and more strongly. The answer is more humanity, not less.
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