Back on August 31st, a professional football player named Ricky Pearsall was shot in Union Square (a high-end shopping district in San Francisco) by a 17-year-old kid who wanted to steal his Rolex watch.
Pearsall was on his way to an autograph signing event, and even though he was shot in the chest he was badass enough to actually leave the hospital the next day. The fine young lad who shot him is incarcerated and awaiting trial, facing the prospect of being tried as an adult instead of the doe-eyed, well-meaning yet confused young scamp we all know he must be.
When I first heard about this shooting, I felt very bad for what happened to Pearsall. I didn't know him, who he was, what he looked like, whether he was a good or bad person, and I couldn't give two craps about football. As a fellow human, though, and a citizen of the Bay Area, the story was troubling to me, and I was pleased to know he recovered and resumed his life while his assailant was probably in for a world of hurt.
A few months later, and just days ago, a heretofore unknown senior executive named Brian Thompson was likewise shot. He did not survive, however. He was killed, and quite deliberately, by a man who apparently wasn't too thrilled with health care executives being paid seven figures per month in exchange for denying coverage to desperate, sick people. As the video of the shooting shown, the killer put a variety of (inscribed!) bullets into Thompson's corpulent corpse.
As with Pearsall, I had no idea who Brian Thompson was. I did know, however, he wasn't a football player (indeed, the guy looks like he'd probably getting pretty winded running a quarter mile) but instead was a richly-paid executive at United Healthcare. Unlike Pearsall, my gut reaction to the shooting was, at best, indifference. Not that he necessarily "deserved" to be gunned down in cold blood but, I mean, c'mon, it's United Healthcare.
It seems that my insouciance wasn't a completely freakish reaction, as the press and social media have been absolutely slathered with tales of not sorrow and outrage but, instead, glee and celebration. Here, for example, it is reported that nearly 100,000 people took a moment to slap laughing emojis onto United Healthcare's weepy post about their fallen leader.
It occurred to the company that maybe being despised isn't a good starting place for receiving feedback so, understandably, they muted everyone so that they didn't have to deal with the actual feelings of Earth.
As a person deeply involved in stock trading, I was curious on the morning of the murder what the reaction of the stock itself, UNH, would be. I was surprised to see that not only was the stock not collapsing, but it was actually going up!
That, it seemed to me, was a pretty cold reaction to the event. It took an entire day for it to dawn on investors that maybe the killing and, even more importantly, the celebratory reaction, wasn't a great look, and UNH sold off hard the next couple of days, wiping out months of gains over the span of thirteen trading hours.
The entire episode reminds me of Bernie Goetz who, almost precisely 40 years before, and also in Manhattan, shot four, umm, "youths" who were menacing him on a subway train. He shot all of them, paralyzing one, and although he got off pretty light for shooting them, the paralyzed person successfully sued him in civil court for tens of millions of dollars that he'll never have.
It is striking how the unidentified Thompson killer is being held up by some as a hero or, at least, as justified. It also added to the chatter when this security camera still was released, showing him flirting with a clerk at the hostel where he was staying.
More than a few females are way more interesting in his jawline and dazzling smile than they are in whom he shot. If you can look this good with a crappy, low-resolution security camera, you've got it goin' on.
A stroll over to x.com finds no love for the deceased Mr. Thompson either. I mean, look, I don't know anything about the guy except that he was a chubby white dude with a huge paycheck, but it's unlikely he was evil incarnate. In spite of that, he is being treated as such, not because of his own personal sins, but because of what he represents, which is a deeply hated multi-trillion-dollar health care industry.
I doubt those getting eight-figure annual salaries at these firms thought they were beloved by the public (nor did they care), but these firms have scrambled to disappear the names, faces, and biographies of these executives vanish ASAP from their websites.
While, at the same time, the general disposition toward finding the shooter can be summed up in a single image.
I don't think this killing is a one-off incident. People are angry, and these are relatively good times. Unemployment is 4.2%. Inflation is (ostensibly) about 3%. The stock market makes lifetime highs every day. And even with all this, people are still pissed off.
Try to imagine a year going by with soaring inflation, soaring unemployment, and rising crime. You think maybe some other prominent CEOs - - maybe even world-famous ones that have become household names - - will be at risk? Meta already spends $23 million per YEAR to keep Mark Zuckerberg from being shot through the brain.
But as Michael Corleone said, if anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone. We are heading into some very interesting times.
