The new American awakening

[Disclaimer:  This post is not condoning violence.  It is a discussion of a social phenomenon that needs to be understood clearly.]

On December 4, in New York, a gunman shot and killed the CEO of United Healthcare.  This week, a suspect was arrested and charged.  But even before the arrest, the attack provoked a response across the internet and society unlike anything I remember ever seeing before.

Given the number of deaths routinely caused by America's for-profit health insurance companies denying vital coverage on one pretext or another, their body count dwarfs that of any serial killer.  Many Americans have a friend or relative who was killed in this way, and a great many more have heard the horror stories.  We don't usually refer to such killings as "murder", and I'm sure that someone can cite legal technicalities to justify that, but the fact remains that these denials of coverage are deliberate acts, taken in full knowledge that they are likely or certain to result in human deaths, and motivated purely by profit.  The obvious assumption was that the gunman was acting to avenge such a case of denial.

The news of the attack unleashed an explosion of pent-up feeling (seriously, do look at that -- I've seen far, far more that's just like it).  The unknown shooter inspired fan art and even erotic fan fiction.  Sober commentators, and even recent Senate candidate Lucas Kunce, while quick to assure us that they were not condoning violence, pointed out that the rage against the system was easy to understand.  Beyond online reactions, wanted posters have appeared in New York -- and the banner depicted above, representing a non-trivial investment of work and risk, was put up near Chicago.

Such an outpouring of feeling doesn't happen from a standing start.  There is a vast sea of anger and hatred out there, and it's not only about health insurance.  People know well that more and more of the wealth produced by American workers is going not to those producers but to a tiny class of oligarchs -- the big investors, corporate executives, and other parasites who now constitute the ruling class of what may be the most unequal society in history.  The worst among them have heaped up obscene fortunes in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.  Wealth in the US today is even more concentrated at the top than it was in France just before the Revolution.

Seeing this eruption of mass public feeling in response to the shooting, the American parasite class suddenly realized what they had somehow failed to notice all along -- that the masses literally hate them -- and they and their media proxies and toadies swung into action with a furious campaign of scolding and condescension.  People are having none of it.  Right-wing media figure Ben Shapiro fumed online that "the EVIL revolutionary left condones murder", only to have his own comments flooded by his own right-wing audience declaring "we feel the same!"  This phenomenon extends across the political spectrum.  It doesn't belong to the left or the right.

Indeed, it's not really political at all -- certainly not on the level of our dreary, sclerotic, polarized, left-vs-right surface political scene.  It's a visceral response, the primordial rage of a nation backed almost as hard against the wall as the French more than two centuries ago.  No politician or party can possibly stop this, or control it, or speak for it.

The message may be getting through.  Earlier this month, Blue Cross in several states announced that it would no longer pay for anesthesia for surgical operations that exceed specified time limits -- a shocking but typical enough example of the heartless cruelty of the system.  Almost immediately after the shooting, they reversed that decision.  And at the same time, companies began purging or hiding information identifying their executives from their websites.  They're getting scared.

This could be called a mass movement, but it's really deeper than that.  The man behind the curtain is clearly seen.  Millions are now looking past the tired old paradigm of party politics, left vs right, Trump, racial and ethnic prejudice, and all the rest of the distractions, to the struggle that really matters -- class.