Celebrating Death

Life is cheap, except for the owner who loses it.

The first assessments of one’s health start with the basics of pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature. If we’re interested in the health of our culture, we have to check its basics as well.

While many indices—economic opportunity, education, and such — give us important information about the health of our coexistent life together, there is no more decisive indicator than how individual life is protected and secured. That is the whole point of our collective organization around a family, community, state, and nation.

Protecting our family members is paramount. Through our communities and states, we establish laws and empower authorities that protect individuals from murder and other physical violence. Collectively, we defend the country from foreign enemies and armies at the national level.

The primary duty of the established order in our Founding is to protect the right to life, liberty, and personal property – none exists without the other.

This brings us to Luigi Mangione, the alleged gunman who is charged with the brazen murder of  UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan on December 4^th as he walked to an early breakfast meeting.

The murder was so shocking that it quickly turned into a national drama played out in the media and social platforms. While the killing seemed to be well planned with detailed knowledge of Mr. Thompson’s schedule, Mangione’s escape and arrest a week later while sitting in a McDonald’s eating breakfast in Altoona, Pennsylvania, are inexplicably careless.

The former valedictorian and top-of-the-class Ivy League graduate had revealed his masked and hooded face in a hostel with security cameras. He also left physical evidence that led to his subsequent identification. And when arrested, he still carried the alleged murder weapon with him.

His victim’s company, UnitedHealth Care, is among the largest medical insurance companies in the world, with over a million medical providers and sixty-five hundred hospitals and medical facilities accepting its plans. It services health plans for nearly fifty million users, and according to Forbes, it has one of the industry’s highest initial claim rejection rates.

However, according to the NYPD, Mangione never had coverage under UnitedHealth Care. On the social platform Reddit, he had complained about a long-term battle for care for a back injury, yet later posted that his 2023 back surgery was a success, and he was no longer taking pain medications.  

After his arrest, his written rambling about the abuses of the “health care system” and the need for someone to stop the “greed” surfaced and provided fresh evidence of our culture’s overall mental health and media-driven emotionalism. It’s not well.  

Many nationally known Democrats – America’s locus of neo-Marxist claptrap – and their national media proxies have endorsed by inference and outright sympathy the acceptance of violence as justifiable in this case because the target was a Chief Executive Officer of a company whose service and performance were supposedly based on greed and the destroyed the lives of their insured – exposing the “progressive” intellectual superstructure for the junkyard of ideas that it is.   

Just as appalling, a sizeable number of social media commentators agreed that the murder was acceptable, and a national poll revealed that 40% of the under-35 cohort considered the killing justified.  

The shocking equivocation on whether murdering Mr. Thomson was justified exposes the soul of an entire radical political and educational movement that promotes and celebrates violence, destruction, and death in every form imaginable.    

Of course, public health in general, the delivery of health care services, its skyrocketing costs, and denial of services for strictly financial reasons, are legitimate fodder for debate – and criticism – as is the role of the government in screwing up the entire industry, to begin with – whether through nationalized medicine or third-party insurance payers. (I’ve long advocated for medical savings accounts allowing individual citizens to pay directly for routine health care with catastrophic coverage for major events, which would remove both  private and government insurance and return medical care to individuals and doctors.)

But this murder has nothing to do with adding to or expanding that discussion – it does the opposite. It’s a spark plug that fires the emotions of silly or unhinged public discourse and defiles civilization’s most crucial standard of personal and corporate responsibility: Thou shall not murder.  

Two weeks after the Thompson murder, a second murder occurred in a private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, on December 17^th. A deranged 15-year-old girl killed 14-year-old student Rubi Patricia Vergara and a 42-year-old teacher, Erin Michelle West, in a study hall class. Six other students were injured but survived, while the female shooter took her own life.

Sadly, the nation’s attention span was cut short by the incessant babble of the authorities and the media we’ve become accustomed to in these all-too-frequent and preventable events. It’s the standard boilerplate language that ignores the monstrous, unimaginable evil—the love of death—that has taken place, replaced by non-confrontational platitudes.  

Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes stated, “The investigation has yet to find a clear motive,” adding the killings were “likely a combination of factors.”

To this point, there will never be answers to “why” as long as the demonic nature of mass shootings is dismissed or diminished, and the why is left to psychologists and psychiatrists to explain. Evil lives far outside of scientific reach.  

Concluding his remarks as if it was a statement of reality instead of wishful thinking, the Police Chief added, “In the midst of this tragedy, our community has come together in an incredible demonstration of support from Madison and indeed the state of Wisconsin and our nation.”

Unlike the murder followed by the sick media drama and thinly disguised admiration for the handsome murderer in New York City, the national media immediately turned its attention from the innocent dead and injured in Madison – and the shooter’s demonstrable cowardly wickedness – to “gun control.” Before the crime scene was secure, Joe Biden and Democrat-Socialist members of Congress ignored the atrocity itself. Instead, they called for the banning of “assault-style rifles.” This collection of buffoons was evidently unaware or uninterested that the young murderess was armed with two handguns.

The juxtaposition of these murders could not be more profound. These events and how the culture reports on, absorbs, and reacts to them speak to the predicate – the health of our life together in community and the moral foundation upon which that rests. It communicates clearly that the protection of life as a fundamental right is crumbling as a dumbfounded citizenry watches.

Nothing about these events should surprise anyone. The culture of death has been promoted and suffused into the corporate body for decades. The country now has a high tolerance rate for both murder and chaos. Murderers nationwide, on average, serve under seventeen years in prison.

Life is cheap, except for the owner who loses it.

The media only focuses on the most sensational murders now. Solving murders has seemingly slid off the law enforcement plate. NPR reports that the rate of solved murders nationally has declined for years and is now less than 50% as of 2020. America’s big cities like Chicago, which has over 500 murders a year, are only arresting someone in 30% of cases.     

The culture of accepting death has been coming for a long time. Fifty years ago, the abortion debate across the US was presented to the public as a rational extension of human freedom.

Instead, today, sixty million abortions later, in the US, we have advanced to an unconscionable enthusiasm in radical left circles to turn a human tragedy, regardless of circumstance, into a celebrated event. Now, the so-called progressives speak of abortion up to and including labor as though it’s a perfectly normal extension of that freedom. Some, including the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, have advanced the right to terminate life even after a baby is delivered.

It is only one note in the drumbeat for death. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, and there are substantial efforts ongoing in many states and at the national level to normalize the practice of death as an answer to problems.  

Only last month, the parliament of the United Kingdom voted to move the UK one step closer to state-assisted suicide, joining a handful of countries that are in the vanguard for death. It is an ungodly yearning dressed up as compassion.  

(Canadian broadcaster CNB reports that medically assisted suicides in Canada soared to 1 in 20 deaths, accounting for 15,343 — or 4.7% — of all deaths in 2023, which was 15.8% greater than the year before. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program has overseen the deaths of 60,301 people since it became legal in 2016.)

The process that has led to these calamities is long-standing and predictable. It is the slow erosion of the immutable Moral laws that grounded the Western World: good restrains evil, law and order, and covenantal community and social order defending life.  

It is a battleground for our time, and we need to turn the tide, not surrender more ground.