The murder of a healthcare CEO by an Ivy League graduate has got a lot of people wailing about the end of civilization or projecting “a hero’s journey” on the murderer.
They are all right and all wrong at the same time.
We can’t condone, defend, or excuse shooting people in the back on a city street. Luigi is going to do a lot of time in prison. And he should.
Maybe that’s the price he was willing to pay in order to make his point. American healthcare sucks. He’s right. But don’t murder, VOTE.
Or maybe run for office or start a business or a non-profit to work on a solution?
But if his real goal was to take a stand for the millions of Americans screwed out of healthcare — it may have backfired.
I’ve seen a few people defend this particular CEO. The NY Times called the CEO a working class hero. He’s not and opinions like that are why satire is dead — when “serious people” bend reality into hyperbole to appease their corporate masters it’s impossible to distinguish satire from “all the news that’s fit to print.”
One economist spent his time defending the insurance industry as not really part of the problem — just a pass through to pay for your very expensive doctors and nurses. But that missed the point. Insurance companies don’t control costs — but they do control who pays for them.
Others have spent lots of hours listing why we can’t murder “businessmen” in the streets and recoiling at all the vitriol spilled on the internet crowing about what a hero Luigi is for murdering the murderer.
Vitriol like this “reporter” for the Washington Post.
The arguments about the end of civilization usually end in who’s next? The CFO, the accountant, the receptionist? Or do we attack other industries? The cars that are not “safe enough.” The Corporations who “accidentally” kill people. The investors who destroyed the housing industry in 2008?
I don’t think we have reached the end of civilization. Maybe the end of civil discussion about corporate power. Until we start holding those corporate leaders personally responsible for the crimes they commit, we are going to see more and more people be “uncivil.” There’s a lot of bluff and anger and people are rightfully cheering the idea of a working class hero.
But until we see as many CEO’s killed as school kids, I’m not going to get alarmed about the “consequences to our society.”
Of course the C-suite will use this as an excuse to further their own security. Build bigger gates around their communities. Cut off any access to the “real world”, and surround themselves with mercenaries for hire.
That’s where I suspect Luigi’s little plot went wrong. It may shine a light for a few days, but the longer term effect will probably be to entrench the powerful behind even deeper moats of power and corruption.
A (non) hero’s journey
I haven’t done a lot of digging into Luigi personally. But it doesn’t appear that he is the victim of a United Healthcare denial. He may have had debilitating back issues, but he was never United’s customer.
He does fit the pattern of a zealot and extremist. The rich boy turned terrorist we have seen for Che Guevara to Osama Bin Ladin. Born into an upper-class existence with high expectations for wealth, power and that bullshit dream of happiness. Somehow that dream sours and turns into a violent reaction in the name of the poor — that is not connected to the poor at all.
The working class and poor can best attain power through mass movements. Unionization, civil disobedience or collective action that convinces the society to change itself.
Sometimes these rich boys turned terrorists can spark revolution. France and Russia come to mind. But they always seem to be hijacked by a Lenin/Stalin or Napolean or Mao into a dictatorship under a new name.
Perhaps at Penn Luigi only learned about programming (software engineer) and didn’t learn this history. Or he just spent too much time reading Ted Kaczynski (the uni-bomber) without thinking about what Kaczynski actually accomplished. He only managed to kill and injure people, get himself a life sentence in prison and nothing changed in corporate America.
It seems Luigi is going to follow in exactly those footsteps, and he deserves it.
But the rest of us need to find productive ways to hold these crooks accountable and make the changes we need to truly save our civilization for the corporate leaders who are doing everything they can to destroy civilization as well know it in favor of their own private oligarchy.
I agree with your slippery slope argument. If we condoned this, then it wouldn’t stop with CEO’s. Then vigilantes would be murdering CFO’s and on down to the rank-and-file workers. Violence begets violence, and nothing gets solved under those circumstances.
A mass movement might help, but for individuals I think it’s best to learn as much as one can about one’s own insurance coverage, and try to protect oneself from surprise gotcha’s.
Yeah. My favorite short term solutions are these groups that buy medical debt for Pennie’s on the dollar and forgive the debts. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/08/15/1093769295/this-groups-wiped-out-6-7-billion-in-medical-debt-and-its-just-getting-started
Now that’s a nice charity.
Agreed in full. You know i think back of some of the recent vigilantes -Kyle Rittenhouse really got away with murder in my opinion. He just wanted to take his assault rifle and shoot some people and we let him off. Also, that guy that took a shot at the cancer of a man Trump. It’s not the best way to go and sets a precedent of violence that seems to be prevalent in today’s American culture. Too many guns, too many violent opinions and not enough civil discussion , history and voting.
I like you condone violence and hope for a calmer , better future but i think we are tending to lean into a bad era.
-Butterpants
Yeah rittenhouse was at least manslaughter. Disgusting that he is “celebrated.” I hope Luigi does his time and people don’t celebrate him 5 years from now.
Hearing what happened to that CEO made me sick. I remember I was dumping a load of tree branches into a dumpster rental when my daughter, who is more connected with current events, ran outside and told me that the CEO was killed. Murder is never the answer to our problems.
No. Murder is never a solution for anything. But this murder sure exposed the oligarchy and people’s frustration with a system that rips them off in favor of multi-millionaires and billionaires.