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The cold-blooded, targeted murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he walked into a Manhattan hotel early last Wednesday morning has grabbed national attention, focusing some of it on America's troubling embrace of simple cruelty, and of violence.

There's chilling video circulating widely of the hooded, masked assassin pulling out a gun with a silencer, shooting Thompson in the back and then, as the businessman crumpled to the ground, pumping additional bullets into him as he died on the sidewalk. Thompson had a wife and two sons, one who had just graduated from high school and the other still there.

In a different time, in a different America, in a nation more like the one we believe we remember, there'd be uniform outrage at the murder, sympathy for the victim, empathy for his family and friends. But we're in a different place, where cruelty and cheap vitriol dominate.

Thompson's company posted a statement on Facebook expressing condolences to his grieving loved ones, describing him as "a highly respected colleague and friend to all who worked with him." Within 48 hours some 80,000 people had responded to the post with laughing emojis. That didn't count those who "loved" the announcement of the killing, or who "clapped" at it. Posts commenting on how attractive the assassin was, or which called upon those with potential information for law enforcement to withhold it, or identifying other health insurance executives who might be usefully next in line for assassination, have proliferated on social media.

The heartless glee at someone's murder has been justified or minimized as the perfectly understandable reaction to the heartlessness of health insurance companies. Some have sniffed that it's terrific that the killing will spur a "conversation" about health care. By all of this logic, of course, murder is "perfectly understandable," or a good conversation starter, in innumerable contexts. But surely it's possible to be enraged at insurance companies without celebrating homicide. If it isn't, America is in big trouble.

Let's face it, we are.

The delight in Thompson's killing is of a piece with example after example of a nation that in fundamental respects has lost its way, and this is evident across the political landscape.

From the moment Donald Trump mimicked a journalist's disability at a news conference and tens of millions of Americans thought that was just fine, we knew we had a big problem. The same with Trump's mocking of John McCain for being captured while fighting for America in a war that Trump used his connections to dodge. With each act of eye-popping personal cruelty that was defended or endorsed by his supporters, one has wondered: Why is it that Americans who pride themselves on what they feel are Judeo-Christian values regard his cruelty with either a shrug or a thumbs-up?

Trump's presidential campaign was substantially based on deriding the transgender community, confident -- with evident good reason -- that good, old-fashioned disgust at "the other" would serve its tried and true purpose: uniting others in the cause of derision. Twitter, now X, is essentially a hate-forum, a venue for mocking Joe Biden for being old and Kamala Harris for losing an election. It is a virtual meeting place for schoolyard bullies.

The left is its own spectacle of stomach-turning cruelty. When Hamas sent 6,000 gunmen with Israel in October 2023 to blow apart or burn as many human beings as possible as quickly as possible, many who actually tout themselves as progressives rejoiced, loudly. The genocidal slaughter was, as far as elite university faculty was concerned, "inspiring" or "exhilarating" or, at the very minimum, deserving of "contextualization." Across American cities and towns, when people possessed of basic humanity affixed posters with the faces and names of elderly Israelis, or toddlers, or babies, savagely kidnapped and brutally held hostage in Gazan tunnels, self-styled progressives ripped them down.

It's hard to see how our national descent into the acceptance of brutishness reverses itself. To the limited extent presidents are capable of summoning Americans to improve their game, the one we've just elected ain't that guy. That leaves it to the rest of us. But from the looks of things, it isn't happening soon.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate Inc.