VIGILANTE JUSTICE-WHAT IS HAPPENING????

This is a fraught time. The CEO of a huge insurance company was murdered in midtown Manhattan this week and the entire country appears to be on fire with excitement, at least according to the media. What's up here? Well from where I am sitting, what's up is the anger many feel about how unfair the insurance industry has been to consumers in need of health care. More to the point, this particular insurance company, United Health Care, and their right arm sidekick company Optum, has been tormenting many of my fellow therapists during the last six months, by denying reimbursement to their out of network patients, while requiring my colleagues to jump through needless tedious hoops, wasting their precious time and contaminating the entire process.

For myself, I grieve for this CEO's family and friends, and for him. He was 50 years old, at the top of his powers. When I saw him walking to his meeting at 630 am on 54 Street, which was the same street I had my office on a few years ago, in a very cool neighborhood next to the Hilton, I felt horrible. He was shot in the back. What a slimy, cowardly, and deadly action, and I hate the whole violent calculated sickening business. But at the same time, this man was the head of a corporate entity that has been making a fortune through greedy, dishonest, capitalist means, and  at the expense of so many vulnerable peoples' health. And it has been brutally unfair. And now the insurance industry, for the first time that I can remember, appears to be vulnerable itself, through this heinous exercise of vigilante justice. So our world is in flux, and whatever we do, we should remember to breathe, to go within and to use whatever spiritual practice we find helpful, to ground us, and remind us of our humanity, and to encourage us to effect change in ways that are moral, and honorable, despite our outrage at all the injustice.