Is anything more in tune with our times than debating whether Brian Thompson had it coming?
No, not the debate about how high health insurers rank on the blood-sucker scale. How pointless.
Thompson, the slain CEO of UnitedHealthcare, didn’t invent medical indemnity. Profit-seekers did. He was one of them, OK? The American way. Right?
No, what’s in tune with our times is that no one is talking about what happened to Elias Wolford and Roman Mendez.
Ages 5 and 6, respectively, they were gunned down in their school in California the same week as Thompson’s murder. The boys survive at this writing but face lives of pain and trauma. Elias may lose the use of his legs.
Two little boys: collateral damage of the dance entwining the gun industry, the gun-hobby lobby, and lawmakers who do what the blood suckers tell them.
Let’s face it. Though Americans by sizable margins support reasoned gun laws, the do-nothing minority is the tail that wags this dog.
Opposition to doing anything at all about firearms is the best politics. Right, Ted Cruz? Watch the children fall in rows, obliterated beyond plaster-board school halls. Stronger walls, eh, Ted?
Thinking of these victims and the in-tune-with-these-times response – silence – brings to mind one reader’s response to a post-election question on online site Quora:
“Will America be able to survive four years of Trump, or is it over for America?”
The reader’s answer, with which I concur, was, “Yes, America will survive.” However, he appended that with a big “but.” America will make it through, but not all Americans.
I have felt post-election foreboding like this before. When Ronald Reagan became president, I feared for the whole of environmental protection. He appointed sworn anti-environmentalist James Watt to helm the Interior Department. Ann Gorsuch Burford (middle name sound familiar?) came with him, ostensibly to run the Environmental Protection Agency into the ground.
Neither lasted long. Grassroots environmental efforts were mighty and sustained. The Reagan years remain the best years in the life of the Sierra Club.
That doesn’t mean Reagan didn’t cause harm. He did. A righteous cause outlasted him, however.
OK, so what does the return of horrible public stewards and a criminal president mean for the future of this nation? Over to that response on Quora.
“America will survive just as Germany did Hitler. But at what cost?
“How many women will have died because they couldn’t get health care?
“How many immigrants will have lost their homes and families?
“How many soldiers will be forced out of their jobs and careers because they are LGBTQ or because they are women?”
Indeed. How many children will contract polio or die of measles because anti-vax forces wedged a foot in the doorway of health policy?
How many Americans will have health coverage ripped from them? How many insurers, UnitedHealthcare style, will be allowed to sandbag paying customers with dire needs while rejecting others with pre-existing conditions?
How many innocents will continue to die by the hot barrels of hobby instruments?
Lots of people will not survive the next four years if newly empowered ideologues are unchecked.
And there’s the question of a strained planet and its diminished life span because next week’s profit always supersedes mankind’s survival on the political scale.
What does this have to do with the death of an insurance mogul? Here’s what:
We can assume that the next time a big-time CEO is on his way to a big-time meeting in New York City or wherever, he’ll not have his back exposed. He’ll have private security.
He’ll go home to a gated community. He’ll be safe – all his needs met.
This will not apply to those of a lesser rung or a marginalized class. They’ll be at the mercy of a merciless marketplace and political forces that couldn’t care less about them. Unless, that is, they can afford one hell of a lobbying firm.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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