Luigi Mangione - I am You

Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, as he walked outside a Hilton Hotel in NYC. This senseless killing challenges us to ask what drives someone like ourselves to lash out like this.

Yes, what drives us – people like me and you – to commit a heinous act?

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Luigi Mangione grew up in Maryland and attended Gilman School in Baltimore. I was going to Gilman until, at the last minute, my father discovered that his lacrosse coach from college was the Headmaster of rival St. Paul’s School. My lifelong knee injury came from playing football against Gilman.

I was an honors physics major at the University of Pennsylvania. Luigi Mangione was an honors software engineering student at Penn.

Luigi Mangione did not grow to adulthood in Gaza or an East Baltimore housing project with a single mom on drugs. Luigi and I went to the same schools and became adults in the same culture. Luigi Mangione – I am You.

How can I, or someone like me, stand on the sidewalk at 7 AM in New York and shoot a husband and father I have never met? Mangione’s family is well off. Was he angry and ashamed of who he is? Yes, self-loathing is too prevalent in our culture. He may have suffered a back injury while surfing in Hawaii and not had the healthcare he wanted.

Nothing we know about Luigi Mangione justifies what he did. His gifts and special privileges suggest an obligation to contribute rather than lash out. I am asking myself what would make me, or someone like me, lash out as Mangione did? And what should I be doing to help others like him, but particularly those without his advantages, control their rage and become contributors to our community?

Our Flag Still Flies over Ft. McHenry

Francis Scott Key wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner” while watching British ships bombard Ft. McHenry which guarded the entry to Baltimore Harbor in 1812. “Oh! say can you see by the dawn’s early light, … whose broad stripes and bright stars … were so gallantly streaming?” The stars and stripes still fly from the fort’s ramparts.