Luigi, the world has staggered outside itself for you. What are we thinking?
Hey There Luigi, What's it like in New York City?
Hey there, Luigi, what’s it like in New York City?
Do we have sympathy for a man who walked up to another person and shot him?
Some of you are reading this and thinking no. Of course not. Nor should we.
Luigi will stand trial and will almost certainly go to prison whether anyone thinks he’s the next Bonne and Clyde or not.
You can get off on the Twinkie defense, the madness defense, the sleepwalking defense. Someone argued that his wealth drove him crazy. He got off. He killed people in a drunk driving accident. Claimed he was sheltered by his family’s wealth. In the Alford case, a man argued that an owl killed his wife. My personal favorite, based on my libretto Rio de Sangre with Don Davis
https://www.riodesangre.com/
which should be done by the LA opera in Spanish! Is that someone committed murder because they thought they were living in the Matrix. They got off.
But there isn’t a defense for, “The insurance company he was running killed tens of thousands of people, so he had it coming.” There is an outpouring of public sympathy from a nation of people who mostly know someone who has died for lack of medical care. But that doesn’t mean Brian Thompson should have been killed.
Where would that stop?
Other companies have unethical practices that cause climate change or include child labor, and we don’t condone the execution of their executives.
Or do we? You might be reading this, thinking, I do. CEO of United Health Care is the beginning.
Peter Thiel seen sweating here:
is anxious because the revolution is happening.
Laura Ingraham on Fox is appalled. She says that people on the left are supporting Luigi. “Twisted hero worship….salivating over his Italian good looks… Mangionie isn’t a hero. He’s a zero.”
Laura Ingraham: Net worth 40 million.
Laura is wrong. It isn’t people on the left who are angry about the lack of health care. It’s any of us who have been denied.
The first time our family was denied was for a tonsillectomy. It took four years. We joked that this is a new surgery. By the time we got it, my son had lost almost forty pounds from the constant infections.
My husband has been waiting for knee surgery for years. At this point, we’re waiting until he turns sixty-five and is on Medicare.
Killing people isn’t the answer.
But the world has staggered outside itself for Luigi.
Many young people do not have insurance:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/08/wealth-inequality-by-household-type.html
A shocking 41 percent of American young people find it acceptable that Brian Thompson was killed. A man who was married, long separated from his wife, but saw his children at sporting events.
What angers Americans about our health system is that insurance company executives get to decide who lives and who dies.
Everyone you speak to has a different opinion. Those who have been without health insurance or had their loved ones denied a claim see Luigi as Robin Hood.
Laura finds Luigi reprehensible. According to her, he killed a man and deserves justice.
As Oswaldo Mobray said in The Hateful Eight, speaking of the Hang Man, “The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.”
Luigi delivered justice without benefit of courtroom or trial. His own justice. The justice the mob has ruled to be right and good.
But in modern society, shooting people in the streets is not just, and we are not going back to the days of Westerns when people are shot down in front of saloons.
To understand his point of view of people listen to
Brian Thompson was being paid 10.2 million a year by a company with an outsize record of denying claims and having their clients die as a result. He had blood on his hands. He was not innocent. Did he deserve to be shot down?
He would never have entered an American court room for those crimes.
“Justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice at all.”
Which brings us back to stories. The reason I wrote Under a Neon Sun is so that readers would understand the houseless situation. I hear conversation about “them,” branding all homeless people in one basket.
An estimated one in five community college students sleep in their cars as does my main character.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-04-09/california-college-homeless-students-cars
This population should be a high priority for Governor Newsom. We who are houseless or have been houseless students are trying to better ourselves. Stories help us walk in other people’s shoes.
If you don’t know anyone who has been denied health care, maybe you can’t imagine it. But it sucks. If you haven’t been houseless, maybe you think all of those people are drug addicts, but we aren’t.
My new book tells you what it’s like to be in a cult, and then to be houseless and then to be in the world without resources or health care, and then to decide to start a press in Los Angeles. None of that is easy. You tell yourself it’s an adventure. The Los Angeles literary community is built for men, to support men, to include men, and it’s challenging for a woman led press. A man told me once that the literary community in Los Angeles is for men of letters. Well, I’m a girl with chickens who is working with a robust group of dreamers to find stories where the intellect meets the imagination.
Luigi, you could have gotten better advice. But you’ve made a statement now. America is listening. We hear the rumble of, “Deny, Delay.”
We ask ourselves. “Would we do this?”
Most of us would not. We don’t own a ghost gun. We aren’t going to buy a ghost gun. We aren’t going to shoot anyone. We might wish for justice, but we aren’t going kill anyone. Young people who applaud you are living vicariously through you but wouldn’t go to jail with Diddy for you.
America, you are confused, tripped out; you are a wild, mash of a country where the majority of us are aspiring millionaires. Let’s admit it.
This country is built on other people dying for our values.
We don’t have a health care system that works for us, so a kid shoots a CEO in the streets of NY, and other kids applaud because they can’t afford to buy a house or get health insurance and they’re tired of waiting for someone like Laura to understand what means.
We all should have ethics. We should know who the hang man is. This isn’t a vigilante society.
But we are used to the Marines going to other countries and defending our access to oil, to resources. It’s what we call freedom. The freedom to kick out whoever we don’t like so we can stay home and watch television. But we want those Marines to do it nicely. No one ever said it better than Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men.
Don’t shoot down people in the street.
If Luigi hadn’t acted, nothing would have changed. Now, healthcare executives are considering making changes they would not have considered before.
https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-muder-health-insurance-2001041
For the record, Americans have a life expectancy of about 79 years compared to Sweden at 83 and Japan at 85.
Let’s walk around the elephant of America and read and hear each other’s stories. Read James by Percival Everett, All Fours by Miranda July, Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako, The Good Deed by Helen Benedict. Understand women and history, refugees and immigrants.
You cannot understand Blackness or deafness unless you enter story. I invite you in. We can’t all live indoors. We can’t all hear. We can’t all walk. Some of us are in prison. When we get out, we might need help. Our author Francesca Bell teaches at San Quentin where the residents read James. That is why we publish and write and story and swim and dream here at the end of the world.
Read the poetry of Afaa Weaver, A Fire in the Hills and Francesca Bell’s poem on deafness from What Small Sound,
—for my mother
The day before you go deaf completely,
I will make you noise.
I will bring birds, bracelets,
chimes to hang in wind.
We will drive from Idaho
to Washington again,
and I will read to keep you
awake. I will tap
little poems on the backs
of your arms and neck
to be sure you hear me.
I will play spoons on your body
in restaurants, smack my lips,
heave you sighs,
each one deeper than the last.
We will finally shout.
And then, as quiet
slips in, settling over,
I will speak. I will keep speaking.
I will sing you nonsense songs
until you sleep.
No, doctors are not deciding who lives and who dies. Insurance companies are. That said, I do not condone murder, but I understand the rage against insurance companies.
I enjoyed this article—I like the way you write.