This past month has been a field day for news sources nationwide. Constant headlines about Luigi Mangione, the masked UnitedHealthcare CEO killer, are being thrown at us all over social media and on the news. However, there seem to be two different reactions on this topic. One such division is between the younger generations and the older generations, and another division people are talking about is a “class division.” It seems that most topics on the internet today have a polar line between two groups, but this one seems to be a little more nuanced.
Luigi Mangione is the main suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and was indicted for first-degree murder this Tuesday. Mangione shot Thompson in the back when he was walking into a hotel in Manhattan on December 4th. His bullet casings had the words “Deny, Defend, and Depose” on them. Police believe that his motive was due to a back injury he had suffered which left him in extreme amounts of debt. They say that Luigi Mangione was not under UnitedHealthcare insurance, but most likely targeted Thompson because of the size and notoriety of the company. Mangione was an accomplished Ivy graduate described by some as a “smart and normal person.”
While almost everyone can agree that murder is wrong, people on social media have deemed this murder in some ways justified. People all over the internet have shared their stories about the healthcare system failing them and their family members. The cost of healthcare has been a constant debate in the United States, and Luigi Mangione’s motive makes sense to one side of the discussion. What’s interesting is that even with the election this year being so divided between the two main political parties, both Democrats and Republicans have been able to form a united front on the issue. While they have not concluded how healthcare in America should work, lots of people from both groups have agreed that the cost of healthcare is a crisis and has affected so many Americans on both sides of the aisle. For this reason, social media users claim that the “class war” has been a long time coming, and Mangione might have just gotten the ball rolling.
“Gen-Z” has become the target yet again for being insensitive and radical in their views on this issue. In the end, some TikTok users have been vocal about how attractive they think he is, or how they think that they would want to date him once he gets out of prison. On a more serious note, some TikTok users have pointed out that the reason that their generation is so desensitized to gun violence is that they see it every day in their schools. It’s hard to sympathize with a man who died that was responsible for denying healthcare to so many when innocent children die so often and nothing is done about it. In other words, lots of people in the younger generation think that his actions were for the greater good and his motives were justified.
Gen-Z continues to be a sort of outlier with their thoughts and views on many topics. Older generations seem to clash with them regularly, my question is: When was that ever not the case? These older generations themselves had the older generations before them. It’s not like there wasn’t disdain from the older generation for the way the younger generation acted, spoke, dressed, and thought. The sentiment that “history repeats itself” is true in this case, and if it’s true in other cases, this generation will lead to social change, just as the generations before them did. In conclusion, such cases as the one of Luigi Mangione can be bad, but good in the conversations and unity that form.
