When Did We Stop Seeing Humans?

I've been sitting with something that's rattled me to my core - not just the murder of a CEO in Manhattan, but what came after. The reactions. The celebrations. The way we've normalized something that should shake us all.

I need to say this plainly: Brian Thompson was murdered on his way to a meeting. And across every platform, I've watched people cheer his death with a satisfaction that leaves me cold, questioning what we've become.

Let me be clear about where I stand: The U.S. healthcare system is a brutal, broken mess. I have strong views about it - who doesn't? We all carry stories of its failures, whether personal or witnessed. But there's a vast gulf between demanding systemic change and celebrating when someone gets gunned down in broad daylight. That gulf is where our humanity lives.

Brian Thompson wasn't Muammar Gaddafi, leaving a trail of atrocities and human rights violations in his wake. He was a CEO navigating a broken system. I have friends who worked with him, respected him. And I'm watching mutual friends of ours - people who share connections with those now grieving his loss - celebrate his death. There's a cognitive dissonance in that I'm still struggling to process. How do we get to a place where we can cheer the murder of someone our own friends knew and valued?

I'm not talking about Mr. Thompson as merely the personification of a broken system—that's too simple, too easy. I'm talking about how we've lost the ability to see humans within systems, how our collective rage has eroded our capacity to hold multiple truths. Systems can be cruel while the people inside them struggle for improvement from within.?

When we reduce systems to symbols, we lose sight of the larger picture about how those systems actually work—and more importantly, how they might be improved. But when we reduce a person to a symbol, we begin to discard our humanity in the process.

It's the normalization of cruelty that's keeping me up at night. When vox populi are screaming "he deserved it" or "that's what happens," what message does that send? To leaders trying to make difficult choices? To anyone trying to effect meaningful change? "Keep your head down, don't make waves, or you might be next"? None of the systemic change we desperately need will happen if fear becomes our primary motivator.

For those who will argue this is how we drive that change, I ask you: How well-served has this country been, historically, by a reactionary legislative or executive branch? Forty-five days after the last thing to scare lawmakers, terror-driven politics got us expanded surveillance, eroded civil liberties, and decades of unintended consequences. Please don’t try and convince me that a corporate or healthcare governance version of the PATRIOT Act would be a good thing.

And let's be practical: Many of us know someone in that organization. Someone trying to process this loss. When you celebrate this man's murder, what does that say about you? Would you want to work with someone who cheers death? Would you hire them? More importantly, what does it say about who we're becoming?

I refuse to live in a country where we justify murdering people because we disagree with their role in a broken system. If we can't separate our rage at failing institutions from our basic humanity toward each other, we're lost in ways that no system reform can fix.

What troubles me even more is this fundamental disconnect in our rage: A CEO's primary role—their legal obligation—is to increase shareholder value. Full stop. We're angry at Thompson for decisions made within a system that was never meant to prioritize people over profits. The hard truth? If he hadn't made those decisions, he'd probably have been replaced with someone who did. The position demands it. The system of systems in which we reside, requires it.

That has me hitting my head on my desk: the anger isn’t being directed at the right system. We're raging at healthcare executives for playing their assigned roles while the deeper machinery—the one that decided healthcare should be a market in the first place, or that allowed the word “healthcare” into the same conversation as the words “shareholder value”—hums along untouched. While humans make bad choices, while people navigate impossible decisions in broken systems, none of that—none of it—justifies murder. Or, quite frankly, its celebration.

We have to be better humans than this. Not just for Brian Thompson, but for ourselves. For who we want to be as a society. For the kind of world we want to build from these broken pieces.

We have to be.

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