When the masses get mad enough to kill

We're all capable of gunning down the right "them"

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NOTE: The words on the shell casings are now widely reported to be deny, defend, depose: all insurance case-handling terms associated with refusing to pay (as in, “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” and “depose the patient”).

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Coming on the heels of yesterday’s exploration of “dynamic” America’s inherent pathologies …

When a strong majority of your electorate consider the nation to be on the wrong track, there’s a lot of anger and fear behind those numbers.

I remember the white-hot anger I held in my heart the months following my first-born’s Stage IV cancer diagnosis at age two. I was furious all the time — and that was with the finest medical care and insurance mostly doing its job.

I was mad that the world got to go on in its Go Go Nineties mode while my wife and I were stuck in this 18-month fight that was tense as hell every single day, with the occasional mad-dash drive (way over speed limit, emergency blinkers on) to Georgetown University Hospital when the chemo triggered some frightening delayed reaction.

We were stuck in our house around the clock. Vonne needed to take a job at night because the bills were piling up and I worked days, so we saw each other for about 10 minutes each day at our front door, the rest of our time devoted to keeping Emily safe even though her immune system was non-existent for long stretches and never really right.

So, yeah, the COVID lockdown was a big nothing to the two of us. We could have done it standing on our heads. Instead, I watched the kids and Vonne volunteered to stay out in the field every day as a social worker so others wouldn’t have to. That took real courage.

Besides being trapped in our house, frantically afraid of anyone bringing a pathogen that could kill our two-year-old, there was just the parental anguish of sherpa-ing this toddler through non-stop tests and draws (which we often did) and nausea medicine pumps and cleaning her chest catheter that took the scary drugs right up to her heart so it could pump them throughout her body rapidly without triggering some heart attack …

I was scared all the time. I toyed with alcoholism until my just-then pregnant wife (another story) told me to get it together or go away.

And so I started writing a diary to vent my anger.

I read it now and it scares me still. I actually said things like I know now how things like the Holocaust can unfold.

Seriously.

And I could.

I was so mad at everything and the world and God and everyone I knew who DIDN’T have a kid with cancer that I just wanted them all to go to hell.

My pitchfork was always at the ready.

Under the right larger circumstances, when I’m surrounded by others feeling exactly the same way? Could I have been mobilized into all sorts of heinous revenge actions against them — those monsters behind it all?

Absolutely.

And that’s what drove me to drink — that realization. I had always considered myself to be a good person, but I suddenly realized this other potential within me and it was deeply humbling.

I was just pretending not to be that piece of shit.

I was clearly failing as a dad as evidenced by Em’s cancer (Did you do something earlier in your life that made this happen? Asks So-and-So) and my failings as husband were multiplying by the day.

Regardless of any such self-awareness, however flawed, I knew one thing to be sure: Somebody … somebody besides me HAD IT COMING!

Every other day some huge medical bill would arrive in the mail, but all I saw each time was the word bankruptcy super-imposed on the sheets.

A kindly social worker took Vonne and I aside the night after we got the diagnosis and told us this: odds were high we’d get divorced (very high if Emily died), and odds were also that we’d go bankrupt. She told us we’d inevitably consider all sorts of escapes from this nightmare, to include affairs, addictions of all sorts, just plaining running away.

When I’ve relayed that story in the past, people often say the social worker was wrong to plant all that fear in our heads right at the supremely vulnerable moment.

But she did the right thing by making clear the stakes involved.

So, when those scary bills arrived, I would spend hours on the phone with vendors and providers and insurance people and we’d whittle those things down to something correct and tolerable … until the next bill arrived, and my blood pressure would shoot up, and I’d fantasize about killing some bastard on the far side of this tortuous process — some monster in some company making money hand over fist when I was locked into this life-or-death battle with my firstborn and their default position seemed to be that we deserved to go bankrupt.

I mean, we gave our kid cancer, right?

Deny and delay.

Those words, it is reported, were etched on the bullet casings left behind by some unidentified male who walked up to a United Healthcare senior exec in Manhattan and shot him dead on the street before fleeing.

New York police are investigating messages found on bullet casings at the scene of the fatal shooting of the chief executive of one of the United States’ largest health insurers outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, according to two law enforcement officials.

The shooter appeared to have targeted the UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, 50, waiting for him early Wednesday morning before firing several shots, leaving him crumpled and dying on the pavement. Officials said casings collected after the shooting appear to have been inscribed with words including “delay” and “deny.”

My first reaction when I saw the headline?

I know exactly where that guy’s coming from — that place.

So, besides the return of that black guilt that haunted me for months, I felt a lot of compassion for this individual despite his heinous crime.

Sometimes the force of it all is so great and so overwhelming that you just don’t care about the friction it unleashes within you.

I don’t know the details of this guy, but we can all guess that the story behind his murderous rage is a bad one — the kind that tears you apart and makes you consider terrible deeds of revenge.

Or maybe he just has a mental illness and there is no connecting backstory, but the etchings on the casings suggest otherwise.

Still, I must withhold my judgment on both sides until such truths emerge.

In the meantime, I won’t pretend that one bad deed deserves another — no matter the anger level.

I know that now and I knew it back then: If I were to engage in anything like that (and I thought of all sorts of things like that), it wouldn’t have represented anything other than my seeking to escape the situation and my responsibilities. There is no bravery or honor in this path — just a sort of paining it forward.

But I get it, assuming the back story makes sense on this level. You put people under certain stress levels and inevitably they will lash out in inconceivable ways.

That’s the lesson I took away from Emily’s cancer fight: you can’t get rid of your pain by causing others similar pain.

Instead, I was needed … by my pregnant wife, my unborn son, my on-death’s-door firstborn … all of them. I needed to be there holding Em down on the table as they did horrible things to her body, whispering warm words and the occasional hardcore threat to get her to stay still.

I played O’Brien to her Winston Smith, and I will never forget what it’s like to torture somebody like that in the name of some higher good. I got to be very good at it — to my shame.

Emily turns 33 in a few days. She is married and lives a full life that anyone would be proud to claim.

I am a supremely fortunate father. Remove Emily from our equation and there’s no way we’re having six kids, much less adopting three of them.

I owe my entire family to that toddler’s will to live.

We are 30 years past this experience, but I still think about it daily, mostly to remind myself of what I am capable of and what I must guard against in my life and personality.

Whatever this guy’s story, I’m sorry it broke him in this way, and I’m sorry others were so damaged by his loss of control.

But I can’t pretend that I do not understand.

We can all go there.

People today seem to think that all this populist anger should be directed at “evil” Washington, and there are tons of big business interests and oligarchs eager to run that Don’t Tread on Me flag up the flagpole.

Yeah, dismantle the government and then everything will be good and fair for the rest of us!

But that is a misleading image.

Populism isn’t about first regrading the political landscape. That’s a chimera absent a preceding regrading of the economic landscape, and we need Washington intact for that to unfold because Big Business and Big Tech and Big Pharma and all the other Bigs will not do it on their own — no matter how many of them we murder.

All that disabling Washington accomplishes is to leave us masses to the tender mercies of the super-rich who have, with SCOTUS’ help (Citizens United v FEC), hijacked our political system.

This is the world you get when corporations outrank citizens.

You’re seeing it unfold in real-time with Musk and the Tech Bro/Wall Street oligarchs. A hundred billion in donations can buy you your own Constitutional Convention in the form of a pretend government department with magical powers to recast our political system.

Pay to play, alright.

If anyone thinks such efforts, crafted and manipulated by the Uber-rich among us, are going to quell this populist anger and set America on the “right track,” they’re kidding themselves.

We’re just beginning to see the violence that our gun-saturated society is capable of wielding.

Look in the mirror and tell yourself you’d never be capable of something like that.

I know otherwise.

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