We Need To Talk About Justice: What Does It Look Like, And What Do We Want?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
That's a famous quote from President John F. Kennedy's speech on the first Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress. It's a statement that rings true throughout human history.
Another quote that's been echoing in my head today is this: Justice delayed is justice denied. That's a legal maxim that goes back all the way to 1868, attributed to the British Prime Minister William Gladstone.
It was repeated by the venerable Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
These quotes are terribly applicable to the current moment, in more ways than one. But in the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, they feel frighteningly relevant.
Justice is a tricky concept.
How you define it depends on where you stand; based on your life experiences and perspective, you might have a vastly different idea of what justice looks like and how it should be meted out.
For most of us, we imagine justice to be dealt down from a legal authority. If someone has wronged us and committed an illegal offence, we expect handcuffs. We expect a court date, judgement by an impartial jury of their peers, and a prison sentence if it's serious enough to warrant one.
That's what justice is supposed to look like– at least, if you're here in North America.
We expect law and order to function as intended on our behalf.
But what if it doesn't? What if we're wronged, deeply and personally, in the most awful way, only to be told that the offence is not illegal at all? What do we do if the law is not on our side?
What do we do if we know that justice is never coming?
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These are questions that hover at the back of my mind as I watch the swirling media storm around the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Murder is a crime for very good reason; we don't want to encourage violence as a means of solving problems in our society. I don't condone it, for the same reason I'm a staunch opponant of the death penalty.
I don't want the ending of a life to be an acceptable way to resolve problems. Self defence is a different can of worms.
Most people would normally agree that murder is wrong. But if that's the case, why is this case so unique? Why are people not only expressing that they have no sympathy for the victim, or even outright celebrating his demise at the hands of a masked assailant with a gun?
And for the record, though I'm not celebrating this crime, I'm one of those who doesn't feel particularly bad for the man who was killed. For all of my stated empathy, in this case, my sympathy has limits.
For me, I imagine the reason is the same as it is for everyone else. It's about justice, and the knowledge that barring this act of violence, there wasn't going to be any.
Brian Thompson, in the eyes of many, was not an innocent man. You could argue that he was a mass murderer, albeit indirectly. He never drew a gun and shot anybody, at least so far as we know, but he profited off of a system that was designed to callously deny people the healthcare they needed to live.
His company, UnitedHealthcare, was one of the worst health insurance companies in the United States, with a harrowing record of denials that put other corporations to shame.
As the CEO, the figurehead at the bow of the ship, the man who worked his way up through the company to gain his position, he was the symbol of all of those denials.
He made money off of death and suffering. But in the eyes of the legal system of the United States, he didn't do anything wrong by doing so.
Denying healthcare to paying insurance customers is not illegal in America. It is not a criminal offence to let somebody die because they're too poor to afford treatment.
Thousands, even tens of thousands of people likely died as a direct result of the company's actions, and all the while they just raked in the cash.
They put a price tag on human lives.
Many millions more who survived their health issues have been left financially destitute and ruined by the for-profit system. They pay for insurance, and when they need it, the company absconds with the money and leaves them for dead.
But it wasn't against the law.
For the victims of UnitedHealthcare, there wasn't going to be any legal recourse.
For CEO Brian Thompson, there was never going to be any penalty brought down on his head. There were never going to be any handcuffs. No court date. No jury of his peers, no judgement. No prison.
No justice.
The law was on his side, and the people who were hurt by his company were considered nothing more than a statistic. A number typed on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Their humanity was completely ignored.
Is it truly surprising that someone felt that their only hope of justice was to take matters into their own two hands? Peaceful revolution was impossible, so violence was inevitable. Justice delayed was justice denied.
We can't live in a society that glorifies violence this way; it's dangerous for all of us. We can't have random citizens feeling empowered to decide who deserves to die, or we're all going to wind up in somebody's crossfire.
Show me the person who has never worked for a company that caused somebody pain, and I'll call you naive.
And yet, we can't ignore the context of this act. We can't ignore what it says about our world.
We should not celebrate an act of murder, but we need to talk about how we got to the point where Thompson's murderer saw no other path before him.
We need to talk about why he felt that this was the only way that justice would be served.
We live in a world where poverty denies you a right to life, where we treat the poor as expendable statistics and the wealthy as royalty on high– just look at the media storm for Brian Thompson, and compare it to the murder of any regular Joe in New York City.
Someone gets carjacked and killed in his neighborhood, we likely see a brief reference to his death on the news and then it's gone. A flash in the pan, unremarkable and forgotten except by his family.
For Brian Thompson, we've had live updates around the clock since he died. The hunt for his killer spanned multiple states. He was treated like an assassinated King, where anyone else would have been a footnote.
As long as that remains the case, then we cannot claim that law and order exists.
If a wealthy CEO can profit off of mass death and we refuse to hold him accountable for any of it, we do not live in an equal world. If his death is treated as a national tragedy, placed on a pedestal above any other crime, then his life is viewed as more valuable than the people beneath him.
That is not a free country. That is a society built on oppression. Societies of oppression can only hold out so long; you can only push people so far before they break. A rubber band can only be pulled so far before it snaps.
In the wake of this murder, CEOs of other major corporations ought to be thinking about what they might have done to draw the ire of the masses. They should be looking at the celebration, the deification of the shooter, and reflect.
If we don't want more murders in the streets, then we need to think about what justice looks like. We need to think about what we want it to be. And we need to take action to build a world of true equality, where all lives are valued.
We'd all be better off if we did.
Solidarity wins.
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Sam W
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