“Maybe we’re all just broken inside. Unable to really grasp the difference between fictional people and people we just don’t know. They’re all just abstract ideas we’re happy to have suffer for our enjoyment.” — Jonathan Sims, “The Magnus Archives: Season 3″

Have we really become so calloused?

So jaded?

Has everything we’ve endured over the last couple of decades — and especially the last decade — finally frayed whatever wires in our brain make us feel connected to our fellow man, emptied out whatever recesses of our soul see other people as human?

How can it be that normal, law-abiding, taxpaying family men and women could celebrate the death of another human being, not only in some drunken, perverted corner of some seedy bar, but proudly and publicly?

Yet there it is for all to see: friends — people I respect — from across the political spectrum posting glowing commentary on the Dec. 4 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, posting memes with fake alibis for the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione.

Disgusting.

The social media commentary praised Mangione as some kind of hero vigilante, striking a blow of justice against America’s evil corporate health care system by taking out one of its commanders. Bullet casings police found at the scene had the words “DENY” and “DEPOSE” written on them, and police also found a bullet with the word “DELAY” written on it, apparent references to tactics health insurance companies use to avoid paying claimants.

I understand the frustration with the system. It is broken, and too many people faithfully pay large sums of their paychecks into a system that fails to keep up its end of the bargain.

But that gets fixed at the ballot box, in the halls of Congress and in statehouses, not at the wrong end of a gun.

Thompson’s killing changed exactly nothing. Officials revised no policies, approved no claims, cut no checks because Thompson lay dying on that Manhattan sidewalk.

The shooter’s malicious act did nothing but rob a man of his life.

Mangione didn’t even carry UnitedHealthcare insurance, according to company officials, so, if he is indeed the shooter, he didn’t even exact any righteous personal revenge.

More importantly, how can anyone celebrate the senseless death of a fellow human being — a living, breathing, feeling child of God?

At Christmastime, nonetheless.

Thompson, a 50-year-old Iowa native and Minnesota resident, was by all accounts a likeable, caring, friendly, down-to-earth kind of guy admired both by the people he worked for and the people who worked for him. He had a wife and two sons who will miss him. He spent decades climbing the corporate ladder at United after starting out as an accountant at an accounting firm.

He had a life, a family he cared about, hopes, dreams, aspirations, frustrations, disappointments, pains.

At some level, his $10 million compensation package aside, Thompson was just like you and like me.

God loved him the same.

It is never OK to snuff out the flame of someone’s being, for any cause, and it aids and abets that evil to cheer it on.

Shame on anyone who laughed on Dec. 4.

I don’t know how mankind became this way.

Perhaps we’ve always been thoughtless and uncaring. Our language, after all, has a word, “schadenfreude,” for taking pleasure in the suffering of others.

Maybe a gunned-down chief executive would’ve delighted certain segments of the populace in generations past, same as it seems to have brought a smile to so many faces today. Perhaps it only seems so brazen today because Facebook and X and all the rest make it so easy to read what previously would’ve been muttered only in certain company.

But I don’t think so.

It seems we’ve come to think of our fellow man as our fellow man less and less as the recent years have gone by.

As much as it was supposed to bring us together, social media has made it easier to build camps and firewalls to separate ourselves into little tribes where we only hear positive things about ourselves and negative things about the rest. And that allows us to see those outside our little camps as less and less human every day.

When you see someone as “other,” instead of part of your own human race, you’re less likely to care — perhaps more likely to cheer — when some malevolence befalls them.

I don’t know the answer.

I don’t know how we get back except perhaps to get off social media and into town squares to spend time in conversation — face-to-face conversation — with other people.

The more we talk to one another, really talk to one another about the things we care about, the more we’ll find commonalities and shared experiences and shared desires.

The more we’ll see each other as human.

The more we’ll work to aid each other’s ambitions.

The less we’ll enjoy the other’s heartaches.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on X @JustinHinkley.