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Shots that rang out in New York reverberate in Kansas City with a special kind of poignancy.
With movie-star good looks, a wit sharper than anything Gillette makes and an IQ that would compel a rocket scientist to blush, we knew he wouldn’t long be a newspaper reporter, working the night police beat on my small Metro Desk team. It was obvious to us 20 years ago that the nights of intense deadlines, followed by occasional beers and riotous laughter, were numbered.
We were right. He went into corporate communications and did quite well for himself in the health insurance realm. Got married, started a family, enjoyed a life of self-described privilege. I haven’t directly connected with him beyond a stray email or two through my work in the years since, as coverage of his sector is part of what we do here at Ingram’s.
But I’d been able to follow developments in that life from a distance—thanks, Mark Zuckerberg!—which made it more than a bit disheartening last month to see the Facebook post announcing his exit from that stage for reasons that should alarm anyone.
You see, his career had taken him to UnitedHealthcare, where he’d become a senior adviser to Brian Thompson. For those whose memories can’t retain information predating the most recent airing of Squid Game, Thompson was the UnitedHealth CEO assassinated on the streets of New York last month.
The impetus for leaving Facebook wouldn’t merely be the result of living in a society that can vomit up a Luigi Mangione, or cheer him in the streets on his way to court. It also followed from what showed up in social media, including comments by erstwhile “educated” professionals insensitive and witless enough to assess a heartless killing with a “yes, but …”
“The murder of my close colleague unleashed something awful that was no longer background noise,” that post read. “It was hate. Vitriol. Unimaginable jokes over a father and brilliant man who was killed … including posts of that ilk on this platform by friends who presumably know where I work and from whom I would expect more even if they didn’t know.”
Thompson’s death also elevated concerns that most of us should have about our own exposure and vulnerabilities.
“There is a lot about our lives out there thanks to social media that’s available to virtually anyone,” the Facebook entry read. “In a more innocent time … it didn’t matter much. What did I have to hide? Now, it’s concerning.”
Maybe, he says, he’ll be back after a few months. Perhaps never. In the interim, he’s looking for less toxicity and more real-life connections.
He’s savvy enough, of course, to recognize that a social media platform can actually promote those same real-life connections, maintain and strengthen them. Hell, I’ve had dozens of friend requests from people who spent the past 50 years trying to forget what a dork I was in high school. There’s a special power in being able to reconnect with someone across multiple decades, something that can’t be captured with the occasional mail piece or decadal class reunions.
But sewers run through those platforms, too.
If I could tell him anything now, it would be this: You have a megaphone. You worked hard, for a long time, to acquire it. Don’t put it down. Rather than go dark now, rather than stand silent in the face of the beast, my hope is that you’d use it to decry the ignorance and stupidity of those who attack the insurance pillar of this nation’s health-care system because they don’t like a particular outcome.
Consider the regulatory web built around not just health insurance but health-care delivery, financial services, manufacturing, energy, oil/gas extraction—virtually every aspect of the U.S. brand of commerce. A titanic amount of dumb is needed to believe that big business is led by gaggles of moustache-twirling villains intent on killing every one of their customers. My MBA came from Hard Knocks U., not the Wharton School, but even as a failed entrepreneur, it strikes me that offing your base of buyers isn’t a long-term success model.
It takes a special kind of evil in popular media and on college campuses to perpetuate the anti-capitalist nonsense that fed into Thompson’s execution just as it takes a special kind of dullard—a faux-educated Ivy League simian like Luigi Mangione—to seek “justice” by his own hand, wrecking innumerable other lives in the process.
So if you’re out there reading this, my friend, know that the fight is still in the very early stages. It will be won by voices of reason, by champions of what’s right, and by those who understand that capitalism, even in the health insurance sector, makes life not just better but longer for all of us.
There’s never been a more urgent need for the right voice at the business end of that megaphone: Yours. Godspeed, sir.
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