20 January 2025 | The Revolution is Too Much Work

So, where’s the uprising?

Where is the mass movement to change the healthcare system after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione? Or, to put it a bit more crassly: whosa next?

I seem to recall this notion floating around social media (of course) that after decades of trying to work in the system and peaceful protest with nothing changing how healthcare insurers rip off their clients, it was going to be an assassination that would be the tipping point. People were no longer going to be treated as we’ve been conditioned to by a system that is rigged against us. Healthcare CEOs were going to be chastened by this brazen crime and start moving towards a more fair system because we were not going to take it anymore!

Yeah, this is bullshit.

There will be no revolution. We’ll be lucky if there is even token change. One of the reasons I say this is because there have been no signs of such at all since Luigi Mangione was paraded by the New York City Police Department as some kind of criminal mastermind when he entered their physical custody and was later arraigned. News has gone dark on this subject and it will likely remain that way. Sure, news cycles are dominated by the latest thing, but whatever happens to Mangione in the future might be an update or a brief. There is no movement coalescing around him at all, or at least, around the notion that the status quo has been irrevocably altered. The story is no longer on the back burner; it’s off the stove completely.

By and large, we are not going to put energy into any thing resembling a revolution. This takes a level of committment that we do not have, because we do not like being inconvenienced. It’s too much work, especially if more is demanded than just an epic Facebook post or Instagram story. But hey, maybe someone can make a podcast about it and consider himself one of the Freedom Riders of yore.