Making one billionaire’s life marginally harder won’t convince them to change anything.
Counterpoint - someone shot a billionaire in the head, and most of the country stood up and said “yeah, fuck health insurers.”
Hassling powerful assholes is a means to generate narrative. A lot of people - too many people - do not understand reality except in terms of narrative. At the very fucking least, a lot of us need it to get us off our asses.
Of course, I’m not saying that doing so can’t cause change, but rather that it doesn’t often do so. The murder of a healthcare CEO is very different from, as you said, to “block billionaires driveways or their offices,” and we can’t easily expect people to be willing to actively plan murder and be willing to go to jail, against every CEO that does anything objectionable.
If we want to look at protest from a reasonable lens, as something that the largest amount of people can individually, personally get on board with in terms of the action they can take, murder just isn’t often on the table.
On top of that the majority of Americans have direct, negative experiences with healthcare, whereas if you killed an oil CEO, you’re not gonna have that same % of people with direct negative experiences backing you up.
Also, note that even after the shooting, nothing has systemically changed about our healthcare system, and politicians have been largely silent on reform efforts. Because even though he died, nothing has been made materially more difficult for the company, or for the people affected by it, as a result of the shooting. Many people support the murder, but there’s no “we’re going to keep doing this until you make these explicit changes” that people can look at and go “oh, I want this thing to stop being bad, here’s the exact demands that must be met to make that happen”
Shoot a billionaire in the head, and you get public support. Make it unprofitable to continue, and you get reform.
Counterpoint - someone shot a billionaire in the head, and most of the country stood up and said “yeah, fuck health insurers.”
Hassling powerful assholes is a means to generate narrative. A lot of people - too many people - do not understand reality except in terms of narrative. At the very fucking least, a lot of us need it to get us off our asses.
Of course, I’m not saying that doing so can’t cause change, but rather that it doesn’t often do so. The murder of a healthcare CEO is very different from, as you said, to “block billionaires driveways or their offices,” and we can’t easily expect people to be willing to actively plan murder and be willing to go to jail, against every CEO that does anything objectionable.
If we want to look at protest from a reasonable lens, as something that the largest amount of people can individually, personally get on board with in terms of the action they can take, murder just isn’t often on the table.
On top of that the majority of Americans have direct, negative experiences with healthcare, whereas if you killed an oil CEO, you’re not gonna have that same % of people with direct negative experiences backing you up.
Also, note that even after the shooting, nothing has systemically changed about our healthcare system, and politicians have been largely silent on reform efforts. Because even though he died, nothing has been made materially more difficult for the company, or for the people affected by it, as a result of the shooting. Many people support the murder, but there’s no “we’re going to keep doing this until you make these explicit changes” that people can look at and go “oh, I want this thing to stop being bad, here’s the exact demands that must be met to make that happen”
Shoot a billionaire in the head, and you get public support. Make it unprofitable to continue, and you get reform.