My social media feed is at war with itself right now over whether it’s okay for people to celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson, a rich and powerful man responsible for the management of a company that has inflicted—and continues to inflict—untold misery on the general populace. While that battle rages, I’ve been trying to put my finger on my own ambivalence over this question. If I agree that the celebration of political murder is horrible—and, despite the killer’s muddled politics, the murder itself was very political indeed—then why do I find the lecturing over this one to be so tedious and missing the point? What point exactly could the assassination-is-bad camp even be missing?

I think, for me, it’s that despite the willingness (at least at first) to make a folk hero of the killer, despite the occasional expression of glee at the now shattered untouchability of the CEO class, what I’ve seen has not been, at its essence, a celebration of death. It’s been a collective sharing of painful memories and painful present circumstances, and, yes, of anger, acknowledging what UnitedHealthcare and the broken American healthcare system at large have meant to those Americans (nearly all of us) who have struggled with them. I have seen people saying “we shouldn’t celebrate this,” and others saying, “our pain is too great to expect us to find empathy for those who have inflicted it,” and it’s hard for me not to think that both are right.

It’s important to note that this has been a countrywide and nonpartisan phenomenon: the collective outpouring of hatred for UnitedHealthcare has been present everywhere from the bluest corners of Bluesky to the comment sections of Ben Shapiro’s YouTube segments. Like the killer himself, the politics of Team Folk Hero are muddled at best. And what else can you expect, when our healthcare system, and United in particular, has preyed upon Americans with its own brazen glee for the better part of all our lives?

What I’ve seen online has reminded me most of a shiva, the Jewish funerary ritual where for seven days after a death, the closest relatives of the deceased receive daily visits from their communities: to allow them to pray the Mourner’s Kaddish, to save them the work of preparing meals for themselves, to prevent feelings of isolation and loneliness, and to share stories and memories about the deceased. Sometimes the stories are sweet or funny, and sometimes they are painful; the goal is to remember together who this person was to us, both the positive and the negative. The sharing of these memories allows not only the family but the whole community to process what has happened, and to comfort the family not merely with food and company but with shared experience and validation.

I think it is a mistake to see the hordes of people sharing stories of how UnitedHealthcare made their lives worse, and come to the conclusion that what we’re witnessing is a celebration of murder. What I’m seeing is story sharing, and validation of each other’s pain and anger at a system designed to crush us for profit. I’m seeing relief that people aren’t alone in these feelings, that someone else also saw this as the existential crisis it is, enough to take drastic action. I’ve seen hope (misguided, in my opinion) that the C-suite class will find the fear of assassination enough of a motivating factor to reprioritize their companies’ goals towards a more humane system, and I’ve seen bitter comments about how other murders have been either celebrated or ignored without ever triggering a backlash of media scolds. How, if our children go to school terrified that they’ll be shot to death, why shouldn’t CEO’s feel the same at work? Or, if the public lynching of a Black homeless man on the New York subway ended with no negative consequences for the killer, and indeed a growing folk hero status for him on the right, why should the killer of a man responsible for so much death and misery face any worse consequences?

I have no answers for such questions. Only memories for sharing, and ears for listening.