Dear Luigi,

Not funny, Bro . . .

I’m a little embarrassed to join the horde of onlookers to your drama, but how could I not? It’s too much fun, and I’m just an old man with nothing better to do.

I had thought about setting up a Gofundme for your legal defense, not without a nice rake-off for myself, but apparently no social media platform would tolerate it. I’m confident you won’t lack for support.

Like many others, I could speculate about your guilt-laden capture. My guess is that you knew the jig was up when your photograph at the hostel surfaced. Hence the incriminating contents of the backpack you persisted in carrying. Perhaps you planned on getting caught, but if so, why go all the way to Altoona, Pa.? Why would anyone want to go to Altoona? Because Sheboygan was too far away? My guess is you were resigned to being picked up, but you made a halfhearted effort to get away and carried with you that token protest note.

Your ideology is naturally a leading topic of speculation. As a lifelong lefty polemicist, I have to tell you, it’s kind of a mess. But that’s true for most people. How else could half of the electorate vote for a certifiable ignoramus and buffoon who is hell-bent on ruining their lives?

The moral question is still uppermost. You did murder an innocent man, at least one not less innocent than many others. I can’t speak on how much pain your back is giving you, but surely your wealthy family could have afforded to provide whatever you needed for it. In the grand scheme of things, as you must know, the CEO was only a cog in an infernal machine. No worse than many. And shooting him does nothing to slow down the machine. Of course you know this too.

From an ethical standpoint, the worst thing about the deed is its ineffectuality. I still have to take exception to some of the moralistic takes on your crime and its exaltation on social media. The inescapable reality is that massive violence is visited upon the innocent every day in this, the richest country in the world, by an inhumane system. Its inpersonality does not mitigate its systemic moral depravity. Shooting the dude was not o.k., but it’s still true that otherwise, things are still massively not o.k.

Not a few have taken notice of the acquittal of a man for needlessly killing a rowdy street performer in the New York City subway. There are atrocities of justice great and small. There will be more, despite your actions.

You have a precursor whom everyone has forgotten, which is part of the point. His name was Joe Stack, a software engineer who flew his plane into the Internal Revenue Service office building in Austin, Texas, in 2010. Like yours, his ideology was a muddle. He accomplished nothing more than killing and injuring random IRS workers.

Perhaps you are too young to be aware of John F. Kennedy’s most-quoted remark, probably not original to him: “When peaceful revolution is impossible, violent revolution is inevitable.” What you did is far from revolution. In fact, it barely rates as rebellion. But the truth of the dictum remains. When politics is closed off to dissent, when avenues of redress are blocked, as they are now, violent, even self-destructive acts of frustration are easy to foresee.

We are sinking further into that kind of period now. Majority sentiments on matters such as abortion and gun control are routinely thwarted by narrow interests. State legislatures exercise dictatorial powers without benefit of majority voter support. The Democratic Party is no longer seen as the party of the working class, by the working class. Indeed, it can only claim to be so compared to its competition.

Our political system works less well than ever. Like an over-heated pressure cooker, something will have to blow. More terrorism will not be helpful. The time-honored, effective resort is what used to be called industrial action. It boils down to masses of people choosing non-violent, non-cooperation with the system, starting with declining to work. That would get gang-buster results.

Those inclined to similarly violent, anarchic impulses will have reckon with the fact that their wishes were granted by the presidential election results. Who is there to rebel against now? Some rethinking will be necessary.

The online amusement over a CEO’s murder should not be surprising, but there is a double meaning to it. Sure it was easy to hate someone you didn’t know, from whom a line can be drawn to corporate policies that hurt people. But that’s our system. If you didn’t object to it before, if you failed to register any hint of disquiet, your reaction was not political — it was an anti-politics. That’s how you could find any sympathy for that homicidal lunatic, Ted Kaczynski.

Abstentionism or neutrality, even alongside the commission of political terrorism, is picking a side — the side with power, the winning side. Basically you are siding with United Health Care and the whole damn, rotten industry. For the same reason, it is always difficult to distinguish agents-provocateurs, police agents, from sincere terrorists. They do the same things with the same damaging political fallout.

I would close by saying the crucial personal flaw in your logic was that the impact of your crime, aside from that on the victim and his family, will probably be negligible, as with Joe Stack. It will be far inferior to your potential contribution, now foreclosed, to the common good as a law-abiding, productive member of society. That was also your victim, one for which everyone can mourn.