This week is Christmas and my in-laws are in town. The tankless water heater isn’t working quite right, so they have to come to our house to take showers. Privilege comes in many forms. Plumbers aren’t available because, well, it’s the week of Christmas and they aren’t working. One place I talked to said they couldn’t get someone out until the 10th.
We are going to have tea today and seeing It’s A Wonderful Life tomorrow at the Byrd. It should still be a lovely trip. Capra’s masterpiece is still relevant all these years later, avarice to the detriment of mankind is not a revelatory idea but it is one we should continue to explore.
There’s something else that has stayed present in my mind, like so many of you out there I’m sure. A member of the wealthy elite was a class traitor, gunning down the CEO of a predatory insurance company that is responsible for so many deaths. A man who had a callous disregard for human life, as long as it meant profit. The company was using AI to approve or deny claims, per reports.
Ethics and morality are debates for another day, the biggest surprise for me has been the public’s reaction though. Most everyone I know who heard about Luigi Mangione’s actions has been, at the very least, understanding of his actions. America is at a breaking point that has been coming from decades of pressure.
The president is a hired stooge for a South African Immigrant who is the “richest man in the world” and is supportive of a Nazi group in Germany. That’s a lot to take in. Civil liberties, social safety nets and the basic tenants of freedom are endangered in the land of the free. What this the match that lit the powder keg? Time will tell.
What I am more curious about, however, is the spin cycle being applied to Luigi. Before he was captured, the questions abounded - Why did someone do this? What could drive them? Who is responsible for these actions? And when those questions finally had answers, they stopped being asked.
What have you heard lately about Luigi? Have you heard about his reasoning? His upbringing? His motivation? The detailed plan he executed, which culminated in him allowing himself to be captured?
Or have you heard about the throngs of “fans” he has? Seen the terrorist charges levied against him (and someone else who just used his mantra against a CEO)? The stories that are being promoted, at least in my news sphere, are about his appearance far more than his motivations. And that makes me think, why aren’t they attacking him?
People are divided right now. I wonder if they would feel that way if they knew more about him. Even the articles that are written about his motivation are trying to discourage his thinking, take this excerpt from Northeastern Global News:
One notable example is Charles Manson, the 1960s cult leader whose followers carried out a series of gruesome murders — among them, the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders.
To compare Mangione’s actions to Manson’s is lunacy. That was one of the first results when I searched for his motivation. Mangione did have a manifesto on him when he was captured and it is actively being scrubbed from Reddit.
MSN thought it was newsworthy and yet the story is now unavailable. If we wanted to know the WHY of it, why is his reasoning not being shared? If we were to compare that with Manson, a person who has a library’s worth of books written about him and his motivations, we should be able to access this information with ease.
Thankfully, other news sources have included excerpts, like this article from The Independent. I have my own suspicions, the biggest being that news media fears public sentiment aligning with Luigi Mangione the more they learn about him.
This is a story that isn’t going away, sometimes news stories break the cycle and force their way to the forefront. What I foresee is a massive movement to fracture the narrative as much as possible, so that people don’t focus on the issue at hand. A person so distraught by the state of our healthcare system they took an unthinkable action for so many people.
There will be a lot of debate about whether his actions were justified. I continue to dwell on the systems that caused a child of privilege to be spurred to drastic action. What kind of society pushes someone to believe this is the only course of action? Why aren’t we working to resolve the underlying injustices that caused it?
How can we fix something if we don’t acknowledge it is broken? If we let this story get caught in the spin cycle we’re not ignoring the powder keg, we might be lighting it.