[EDIT] Inb4 more people try to suggest that I’m mourning the loss of this scumbag capitalist fuck: No, I’m not sad he’s dead. No, I don’t think corporate murder is acceptable and no, I would not ever rat to police if I knew the shooter and yes, I believe the punishment fits the crimes he’s committed against untold thousands of people. THAT SAID…
I’m not down with vigilante murder or anything because it seems like the slipperiest of slopes toward chaos, but what other option is there in a situation where someone seeks to make an impact in this way? You can’t just beat up evil CEOs and let them go back to work. It would be naïve to expect them to change their ways when faced with consequences for their actions and then promptly let go. It just seems like the chances that it emboldens their penchant for exploitative behaviour and disdain for people in need are too high.
We’re just born into and strapped to this capitalist ride and expected to sit quiet and make these leeches their billions. How else can this cancerous greed possibly be dealt with? Is vigilante murder the only effective option? Honest questions. I’m terribly conflicted and I’m genuinely curious what more reasonable and intelligent minds than mine think about this because I can’t think of an alternative to murder in this case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t have to resort to vigilante killings to level the playing field but I 100% understand that we don’t live in a society where the rich will ever give a fuck about the rest of us or would ever sacrifice their power over us in the name of goodwill.
I think it all boils down to that nebulous concept of “the social contract”. The most naive interpretation of the justice system is that it will provide justice when justice is demanded. It is, after all, called “the justice system”. But what constitutes justice? And who receives it? We have already seen two separate supreme court decisions that state unequivocally that the police are neither obligated to serve nor protect people. We have also seen that young black men are 7 times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes than young white men, so we know that the justice system does not work for all of us. We know that rich people get convicted far less often, and for far shorter sentences than poor people, and we know that the legal system saps the opportunity to acquire generational wealth from those who do get convicted.
It is illegal to shoplift $100 of groceries from a corporation, but it is perfectly legal for that same corporation to drive out competition and then raise prices, in essence stealing from the entire community. It is illegal to intentionally harm someone, but it is perfectly legal for a medical insurance company to deny coverage to paying customers for necessary medical intervention.
When justice is completely out of reach by legal means, the flimsy fiction of the social contract is voided. New York City has somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 murders per year, which means that there have probably been 5 or 6 other people who have been murdered in the city since Brian Thompson was shot. Are the police putting the same effort into tracking the killers of those people as they are into Brian Thompson’s murderer? The reality is that the vast majority of us are intentionally excluded from the halls of power. The American Declaration of Independence makes the bold claim that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Does the present situation in this country feel to you like equality? Because to me, it feels like there is an owner class, and a peasant class, and brother… we ain’t the owners.
The guy who wrote those words was also raping his slaves. It’s always been this way.