Smock Blogs

The coverage of the killing of Brian Thompson assumes Stalinesque proportions when we think about how many front line healthcare workers have been punched, spat on, and cursed out when people find out the insurance they’ve been paying for instead of taking the kids on vacation or getting a new refrigerator won’t cover the care those kids need. Because it’s not a tragedy until it’s a CEO at the other end. Up until then it’s all statistics.

Think about the last time you had to call your insurance provider, or they called you to tell you a request for a medication had been denied? What did that look like? Were you calm, measured, civil? Or did you take that opportunity to vent your frustration on whoever it was, because you never got the chance to tell the CEO how his company’s policies are ruining your life?

The “front line” of doctors and nurses are fighting a two front war: one against whatever ails you, and the other against the insurer, most often the pharmacy benefits manager, a middleman organization staffed with pharmacists and doctors whose sole purpose is to enact policies that make sure you’re using the most expensive/profitable drug possible.

When JFK was assassinated, Malcolm X said that happened because of the climate of hate, and that the chickens were coming home to roost. And if we analogize this further, JFK and Thompson had that in common: people hated what was happening around them, and someone opted to take that violence to someone they saw as responsible. In both cases, Oswald and Mangione, they appear to have been individuals who blamed their targets for larger woes, and both those acts were rightly seen as senseless violence.

Unlike the sensible violence of the Vietnam War and the denial of critical care so that the Brian Thompsons of the world can afford to send their kids to better schools and shareholders can build that second lake house. Because that’s the contrast, between acceptable and unacceptable violence.

We don’t want to think of companies doing violence, because it’s capitalism and if you work hard enough and were born in the right place and your parents already had money you too can someday stand bestride the world with your fellow CEOs, toasting each other as those less motivated rail against your country club gates.

But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

That’s Martin Luther King Jr., articulating better than I ever could that if you take away people’s agency, their choice, their voice, they turn to the only option they have left. Note that I didn’t say “feel that they have left,” because it’s not a matter of perception. It’s a matter of every other turn being a dead end, and while a violent path isn’t a desirable one, if you’ve been silenced long enough, it can feel like the only one.