NYPD released photo
by John Wood Jr., National Ambassador, Braver Angels
Democracy is many things. One of those things is delicate.
It is held in place by a quiet commitment to certain standards of decency and the legitimacy of the processes by which we adjudicate our differences and remedy injustice. Among other things, it requires patience and a respect for the dignity of human life—and a recognition of the fact that outrage in defense of humanity may tempt us towards becoming like the things that we hate.
Eleven days ago, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed by an assassin’s bullet in the light of day as he walked down 54th Street in New York. As a manifesto obtained from the alleged killer makes clear, the motive for this act was to punish Thompson as a leader of an industry that many believe to be fundamentally responsible for the deaths of many Americans in the interests of profit.
While this act has naturally been condemned by many, the alleged shooter has indeed been celebrated by no small number of people, even glamorized for his good looks on social media.
The outrage of many Americans towards health insurance companies is fierce and longstanding. It is a bitterness that stems from the painful experiences of many who have had to contend with what feels like the cold calculus of insurance company bureaucracy during the most painfully vulnerable moments of their lives, in some cases to live or die according to the decision of what they see as a self-interested, multi-billion dollar corporate entity.
This suffering is real. This frustration must not be minimized or dismissed.
Yet violence as a means of making a political statement (regardless of how understandable the underlying grievances may be) signals a vote of no confidence in the institutions of our society and their ability to respond to the sufferings of the American people. This is more obvious in the celebration of such acts.
The temptation to violence in the face of injustice, particularly such injustices as are matters of life and death, is a natural one. It is one of the oldest impulses in human society.
My friend Hawk Newsome of Black Lives Matter New York, who has participated in many Braver Angels programs over the years, spoke out in the aftermath of the acquittal of Daniel Penny in New York recently. (Penny is the Marine Corps veteran who tragically killed a homeless man named Jordan Neely by putting him in a chokehold in an effort to defend passengers on a New York subway to whom Neely was threatening, according to witnesses.)
Newsome stated that if white vigilante violence towards Black people was to be allowed, there should also be “Black vigilantes” who would act in kind “when they oppress us.”
I have heard from a number of you about this. The facts of the case aside (and Hawk has reflected upon them more since the verdict), the idea that unlawful violence must be met with violence in return is older than Malcolm X (who declared such oppression must be resisted “by any means necessary”) in the history of our society.
I have always called upon Braver Angels to follow the path of nonviolence in the tradition of Martin Luther King. Yet part of what that calls upon us to do is to be understanding with respect to how human beings gripped by passionate outrage against injustice as they see it may be driven to violence–while still calling upon them, and ourselves, to “love our enemies” even while making the case for justice.
The killing of Brian Thompson goes beyond rhetoric justifying violence in self-defense (though it stems from a view that American capitalists are responsible for the lives lost of ordinary Americans). It is violence as a political statement and an act of revenge. This sort of violence is not unique in American history, and it is normal in many parts of the world.
Let it not be normal here. Let it not be celebrated.
Yet let it also be the case that with righteous compassion for the pain of our fellow Americans, we may work together to address the suffering in our healthcare system, among the poor and downtrodden, and across every domain of American life.
The legitimate processes of democracy engaged in a spirit of justice and community must be the answer. This is the path that we must choose. May we never live in a society where we believe that either violence or despair are the only roads left to us.