A crushed Maid Marian

Robin Hood represents the ideal of the common people of England in the later Middle Ages. He stands for liberty and the rights of the people against unjust laws and the tyranny of the nobles.

As I’ve professed more than once this past week, I’m not a fan of vigilante justice. This country has quite definitively clearly established itself as the wild f’n west already. No need for armed militias of one, kwim?

But…

There was something sickeningly appealing about the person who communicated disdain and “do better,” in NYC last week when he assassinated a 50 year-old insurance company CEO. He seemed meticulous and noble in his task, as if he were striking out in defense of every single person in this country who has come out on the losing side when it came to fighting with insurance companies for the coverage with which they thought their premiums had provided for them.

On some primal level, I wanted this masked avenger to get away with his crime.

The previous statement is not a boast. Make no mistake, in no way did I want the perpetrator of the killing to begin a spree of similar cold blooded murders. But, I did for a moment imagine the trepidation insurance company and other executives might be feeling in the face of such a targeted crime. I wondered how this new sense of vulnerability might just give them the smallest peek into the precarious position of an individual or family who have been made to choose between medical care and rent or food or tuition.

I have no ill will to individual executives, but instead feel a resentment to a culture that somehow perceives what a CEO (or sports figure or entertainer etc.) contributes to, or provides for, society is of such tremendously inflated value that it is worth an annual compensation which is greater than what I will earn in my entire lifetime.

According to the mayor of the city where the suspect shot down the CEO, medical expenses are the greatest cause of bankruptcy in this country. That’s intense, isn’t it?

Am I expected to care more about a man who lead a company with a documented history of using faulty AI to deny healthcare to 90% of claimants, being gunned down in the streets than I am about children being massacred in their classrooms?

I can’t.

I won’t.

What I did surprisingly feel, however, was a sense of unity in this country which I haven’t experienced since post-9/11. The population of this country was once again connected over a common enemy. How strange – the insurance industry was our shared domestic terrorist.

Those who needed healthcare were the target.