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From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.
Matthew 11:12
The now infamous hooded man caught on camera grinning at a Starbucks shortly before murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this week is undoubtedly reveling in the storm of reaction to his heinous crime. For me, watching footage of a human being shooting another human being in the back is absolutely shocking. What better way to feed a darkly and deeply broken need within someone prompted to coldly ambush and shoot another than the powerful affirmation of attention? I’m certain his twisted dopamine meter is off the charts as he watches, reads, and digests, the sheer volume of response across all channels.
As a nation, we have a shared agreement that murdering other human beings is unacceptable. This norm of our society, built on a moral code, and put into law, affirms our collective agreement that the planned assassination of a person is bad, a thing to be condemned and punished.
And yet, parallel to the condemnation of this murder has been a steady stream of rationalizations, sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle. There has been a strange “we shouldn’t kill, but…” in much of the commentary. What’s the “but” in the storyline? Our broken healthcare system is now driving people to murder.
What happens when reason breaks down? When we run out of words to express what we’re feeling, what we want, or our capacity to do anything with them? We turn to the animal within. The physical creature who can no longer propose and instead moves to impose or, dare I say, depose. We know the animal. It sits just on the other side of the mostly civil self, waiting to be “triggered,” “driven,” “frustrated,” or “made” to act. We might ask, “made by what?” Whatever it is that opposes the will of the normal human being on the other side of Mr. Hyde.
When we tie an act of murder to a social issue, like healthcare, we ennoble the act. Sure, we technically condemn it as vile, heinous, craven, etc. But in associating the act to that problem, we justify it’s aim even if we criticize it’s means. The message becomes, “I don’t support your act of murder, but the problem troubling you is big enough that I understand why you did it.” Underpinning this thinking is the relativistic logic that the objective wrong of murder may not be “as wrong” in certain circumstances.
Moving out of reason and subtlety, we’ve witnessed a parallel track of celebration by a not insignificant number of people who see Thompson’s murder as a lightning rod for mobilizing toward a cause. Literally celebration. In this vein, we’ve seen a very dark and twisted bit of invective against the “system” or “the man” or “corporate evil” paraded gleefully under the guise of justice and book-ended with words like “the oppressed” and “the wronged” as mechanisms for suggesting he had it coming.
The murdering act was real, physical, and final. However, words also matter. When we use words like “vigilante,” we are evoking a sense of necessity toward an injustice. Sure, we say vigilantism is not acceptable, but there is a subtle endorsement. An invisible “wink” that implies “we get it.” Not all violence is physical and America finds itself gripped by a culture of death, complete with its own vocabulary, which unambiguously suggests that there are simply times when it’s justified. Such words are violent. Such thinking is dangerous: to others and to our society.
There is no justification for murder. By it’s nature, it is unjust, and attempting to soften it by equivocating it with a “just cause” is flatly wrong. The infamy we afford to the deranged outliers who choose to wrap their anger, desire, hurt, and will, into acts of violence only encourages it. Our words matter and it is the responsibility of each of us to consider carefully what we are saying directly or indirectly when we unleash them upon the world.
