When Sasha was born, my coworkers at RPL threw a baby shower for Shea and I.
I still remember a couple co-workers who both had older children – one in high school the other with two in their early 20s – giving me a line that I still think of to this day: “Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.”
At the time, one coworker had a child who was dealing with some serious issues related to neurodivergence that were impacting their ability to work and other parts of their life.
The other had a child who had split with a fiance and was moving back in with them while her other child was doing well with an engineering job thousands of miles away on another continent but which meant she only saw her son maybe once a year and had to constantly worry about his safety working in a country where foreigners were at risk for kidnapping and worse.
Pace is 17 and Sasha is only 11 but I often think about how much easier life was when they were small (not that it was easier – this is just the rose-coloured glasses of hindsight – but it’s true that their problems were definitely smaller) as Pace is driving, has a girlfriend and contemplates his post-secondary path while Sasha is also gaining more independence, dealing with the realities of being a pre-teen girl in a cyber age, as well as both of them living in an age of increased awareness of and exposure to gender fluidity, mental health struggles, broken and blended families, addictions, multiculturalism and so many more things that weren’t barely known let alone prevalent when Shea and I were young.
Although things are still fresh, details aren’t fully known and, as I type this, the killer is still at large, it would appear that this was very possibly a targeted attack by someone who may have affected by the private healthcare firm with the highest rate of claim denials to insured clients of any company in the US.
One comment in a Reddit thread stood out to me talking about how “maximize growth at all costs” MBA mentality infects, not only the CEOs but also others who are in senior management/middle management roles and rewards those who are most willing to buy into things that fuck people over. This is bad enough in private enterprise but doubly so in sectors (like healthcare) which should have no profit motive at all (and doesn’t in 99% of the developed world.)
Ironically, nurses – who possibly have the darkest humour of any profession alive – were right on top of this news.
This will probably get me on a list but given the prevalence of guns in the US, the wealth inequality, the polarized politics, I’m actually shocked this hasn’t happened before (were the two assassination attempts on Trump during the election campaign part of the same trend?) and/or that it hasn’t happened more where rich and powerful are targeted by disgruntled staff and clients.
