There is much more to this story than meets our own eyes. The writer Joyce Maynard has opened mine, inspiring me to write this poem about what I found in Luigi Mangione’s eyes.

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,

Are telescopes,

Peering deep into our souls,

Past all that’s phony,

Seeing through the masks

We wear, when we are most alone.

The eyes of a killer?

The eyes of a seer?

Eyes abandoned by love?

Hollowed by fear?

Eyes searching for meaning?

And just one, true thing to be clear?

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione

Are not a hero’s eyes.

But pools of terror,

Filled by the pain and surprise

Of how things can quickly fall apart,

Even for those rich, or smart,

“With everything to live for,”

As if those who are poor, do not.

Did pain push him into despair,

Or, was it somehow there,

Hidden deep from his family’s success

Waiting to be unleashed

By excruciating stress

So deep it tore the skin off

What he spent years struggling to suppress?

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione,

Alone, alone, so cornered and cut to the bone,

Carved out by difference, and indifference,

Or rejection, or isolation,

At odds with family expectations,

And the casual cruelty of a soulless nation.

A young Werther for a broken age,

Each day drenched in so much violence,

That individual acts become blurred

With mass murders, or maimed children;

And acts of complicity are reflected in silence,

Even when life’s denial, kills humans softly, over time.

The Eyes of Luigi Mangione

Cry out to us for help, to save him from despair.

Does anybody care? Does no one feel his pain?

How could a parent give up on their child?

Let demons destroy that perfect body,

Or eat away his beautiful brain?

We can focus on the life Luigi took,

And, not or, on the one we took from him.

We can say, without much depth,

That murder is murder, or death is death.

But then we miss that moment of attunement,

To gift those we love, and others, one more breath.

***

(The writing of Joyce Maynard on December 10, 2024, inspired me to look deeply into Luigi Mangione’s eyes, and examine beyond the headlines, the social media memes and the polarized positions that have already framed this human tragedy. The piece from her personal Facebook posting is reprinted in full below, with Joyce Maynard’s permission).

By Joyce Maynard:

Sometimes an individual I read about in the news captures my attention in a particular way that seems to go beyond the scope of the news story itself. This probably has something to do with the odd ways that The Big Story touches issues or experiences in my own life. Sometimes it may be nothing more than a photograph that calls out to me—a particularly compelling image. Often this has to do with the person’s eyes.

It happened again this week, when an employee at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, recognized the young man bent over his laptop having a hamburger as the person of interest sought by law enforcement officials across the nation for the murder of a health insurance executive in Manhattan last week. It’s hard to grasp how the McDonald’s employee recognized this young man—who was wearing a face mask at the time—as the object of a nationwide manhunt, but having studied the photographs of him that were everywhere for a few days leading up to this event, I think I understand.

The eyes of Luigi Mangione—the young man in question, now incarcerated in a jail cell in Pennsylvania, charged with murder in the first degree—are deep and dark. He’s not simply handsome; his face has a haunting quality. Without wanting to read too much into a story whose bare outlines I know only from a handful of news story, I get the impression, from studying this photograph, that Luigi Mangione is a tormented individual, and a person suffering from an extraordinary measure of pain.

What I’m saying here should not be misinterpreted as any kind of defense of murder. The actions of a victim—including one who presided over a massive corporation that denied insurance coverage to thousands of people who then suffered immeasurable sorrow and pain, possibly loss of life—in no way justify the act of taking the law in one’s own hands and putting a bullet into that person as he headed into a board meeting.

If the young man captured by police yesterday committed that act, he deserves punishment, and will surely receive it. While it’s evidently true—and not surprising—that vast numbers of Americans who have been victimized by the insurance industry are celebrating him as an outlaw hero, his actions speak to a kind of lawlessness we’ve been witnessing plenty of, among certain political leaders of the right, in recent years.

I can no more endorse shooting an insurance executive because you despise his company’s policies than I can excuse the violence of the rioters who desecrated our nation’s capital back in January of 2021 because they were unhappy with the election results.

But there’s no way I can look at the face of Luigi Mangione without thinking about my own two sons (now 40 and 42, both fathers, caring for wives and children, trying to do the right thing in the world). Like Luigi Mangione, my sons were the beneficiaries of great educational resources that included private school and four years at a fine (and expensive) university, in the case of one.

Although I supported my children as a single parent, and my financial resources were probably far less than those of the Mangione family (who have been described in news stories as “a prominent Maryland family”), I made sure my sons and daughter never lacked for books, art supplies, music lessons, tennis lessons, summer camp. Most of all, an abundance of love.

I don’t know the details of the Mangione family’s relationship with their son, but I’m willing to bet he was a well-loved person, when he cut off communication with them some months back and disappeared from view. Until this week, when his photograph was suddenly everywhere.

With the exception of a couple of driving violations when they were young, and an incident in the college career of one, involving a middle-of-the-night plan to scale the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, neither one of my sons ever got into trouble with the law.

But trouble takes many forms. I’ve known a few of these.

I’ve come to know, and care about, a great many young people who aren’t my own children, in my years of life on this planet, in this country, and in the world of generation X and Z: these include the friends of my children, and the sons and daughters of my friends, and more recently, the unlikely but deeply rewarding friendships I made with individuals far younger than my own children, when I returned to college at age 65, and spent my days in the company of 18, 19 and 20 year olds. Theirs is a world that bears little resemblance to the one in which I came of age, filled with forms of influence, danger, confusion and seduction virtually unknown to a person born in 1953.

As much as it matters, still, that a parent loves and cares for her child the very best she can, I no longer believe that it is within the power of any parent, any more, to ensure that her child will make his way safely and healthily into the world of adulthood. So many factors are outside of our control now. They come at children from their cell phones and tablets, the bullying of classmates, news of the world and perceptions (not inaccurate) that the future is filled with uncertainty. And worse.

You can love a child with your whole heart—send him off to a good school, sit there among your fellow parents, listening to him deliver a valedictory address – and still, there he is at McDonald’s, with a gun in his backpack, and a manifesto concerning plans to wreak vengeance on the actions of those he perceives (not necessarily inaccurately) as corporate criminals.

Maybe now is the moment to mention that the faces of not one but two handsome young men occupied the news over recent days. In addition to Luigi Mangione, I read a great deal about Daniel Penny, the 24-year old Marine Corps veteran and architecture student—white—who also chose to take the law into his own hands, when a homeless schizophrenic man named Jordan Neely entered a train on which Penny was traveling, in Manhattan. When Neely began ranting and (according to some) threatening passengers on the train, Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and kept him there, long after he’d ceased to move (also according to witnesses), to the point where Jordan Neely stopped breathing and died.

Unlike the actions of the killer who shot the United Health Care C.E.O., those of Daniel Penny were not premeditated. Penny leapt to action spontaneously. Some call him a murderer. Some call him a hero. The jury found him not guilty on all charges. He’s a free man now.

Unlike the eyes of Luigi Mangione, those of Daniel Penny, entering and leaving the courtroom, were hard to read. Reportedly, he has expressed no remorse for his actions on the train that day. If he suffers torment, and he may well do so, it remains a mystery. For whatever reason, his story does not haunt me as the one of Luigi Mangione does.

Daniel Penny will go on with his life. What happened on the train that day will alter its course. But he will carry on. He may well earn his architecture degree. He may even publish a book. This won’t be the case for Luigi Mangione.

Suicide has reached epidemic proportions among young people, including young people of privilege, those who have experienced all kinds of advantages many of us once believed might shield them from pain or danger. Fewer of us suppose this now.

What Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done last week represents another kind of suicide. By taking the life of a man who stood for everything he believed to be corrupt and evil, he was destroying his own future as well. At the age of 26, in possession of so many of the gifts and advantages that might have ensured an exceedingly good life, it appears he may have chosen to commit an act that could lock him up forever.

If convicted, he could receive the death penalty. If in fact he is the person who pulled the trigger that day, I am guessing he understood this, as well as any 26 year old can. Which is to say: Not all that well. He could not understand fully, at 26, all that he was taking away, all that he stood to lose, himself.

There is one fact about the life of Luigi Mangione that occupies considerable significance for me, as I read the few scraps of information we know, so far, about this person whose story we’ll be hearing a great deal more of, in the weeks and months to come.

In addition to being a star student, he was evidently a gifted and highly disciplined athlete at school –a runner and a soccer player. Sometime in the last year or so, it appears he suffered a serious injury to his spine which made even simple movement excruciatingly painful. He tried to overcome this –gingerly attempting to work out at a climbing gym. He tried surfing, resisted pain medication.

One small detail from his biography, recounted by one of the friends from whom he recently severed contact from his biography stands out for me: That the back pain suffered by this young man was so great, and so crippling, that it made intimacy with a partner impossible.

Maybe that doesn’t sound so heartbreaking, to a person who has lived a long, full life of love. But when I read that, I imagined a handsome 26 year old soccer player, concluding that simple human touch was no longer a part of his future.

Close one door, burst through into another. One that heads straight to life in prison.

These are my thoughts today, about Luigi Mangione. And I am thinking, too, oddly enough, about the two young men to whom I gave birth, working hard at their jobs, off with their wives and children today, getting ready for a big holiday. Presents. Songs. A big meal, shared around the table with those they love. I won’t be with either of them this year for that day –or with my equally well-loved daughter. But they remain in my heart.

So I am also thinking today about the parents of the young man who sits in an Altoona Pennsylvania jail. And about parents everywhere, who lovingly send their children—our children—out into the world, launching them like little paper boats on rough and swirling waters. Maybe they keep afloat. Maybe they get pulled under. Maybe they pull others under along the way.

I say a prayer for us all.

Robert F. Kennedy, the father, speaks from the grave to his son RFK, Jr., at a time when everything he gave up his life for–Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Human Decency–is at risk.

(Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Age 14, in the foreground, stands by his father’s casket in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in early June, 1968. TV Talk Show Host Jack Paar, a Kennedy family friend, stands behind the casket.)

(NB: In the aftermath of RFK,Jr., abandoning his own campaign for President, supporting Donald Trump, and Trump’s nomination of him to head HHS, I’ve revived this letter from a father to a son, which I first drafted back in June of this year, on the 56 anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy from New York.

Since this letter was first published, several significant things have happened: first, Ethel Kennedy died, at 96 years old, amidst RFK, Jr’s failing campaign and bitter disagreements between all of her children about his deranged & damaging candidacy. Secondly, the New York Times published a scathing indictment of RFK, Jr, last week—by three first-rate reporters— carefully examining how his father’s murder, contributed to the son’s spiral into heroin addition, sexual abuse, and crazed conspiracy theories. Here is the link to that astonishing story, immediately followed by my letter from father to son, written six months earlier:)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/kennedy-rfk-profile-trump.html?smid=url-share)

Dear Bobby:

I know life has been hard for you since I was murdered 56 years ago, after I just won the California Democratic Presidential Primary. I’m sure it’s been difficult for the entire family.

But, I’m writing to you now, because I believe you’ve taken your grief over my being taken from you at such an early age, in some incomprehensible and unconscionable directions. It’s time for you to reflect on the enormous damage you are doing.

I was glad you weren’t there to witness me being shot in the head. It was bad enough your mother had to see it. The fact that you were asleep in your dorm some 3,000 miles away at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., and had to be awakened in the middle of the night by a priest to hear the news, has always been of some comfort to me. For a 14-year old to have watched such gun violence in person, being perpetrated against his father, would have been traumatizing.

I can only imagine how terrible it was to be rousted from a sound sleep to learn the news. I will be forever grateful to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for flying you, Kathleen, and Joe out to LA on Air Force Two, so you could all be at my bedside in Good Samaritan Hospital. Hubert personified what being a “good samaritan” means.

Even though Last Rights had already been administered to me, I felt you grab my hand tightly and pray for me to survive and for my soul. I shall also never forget how brave you were to stand by my casket, day-after-day, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, while millions of Americans were able to come by and pay their respects. I felt you trembling, but still, you stood there, strong and erect like a soldier of Jesus Christ. For that courage, I shall always be grateful.

However, in pursuing the path of public service, to which many in our family have devoted themselves, you seem to have gotten lost along the way. So, as a deep believer that eternal change for the better is possible, I am offering you the kind of guidance I wish I was able to give you in person:

First, you’ve harmed millions of children with special needs—the same children whose lives our family championed in the Special Olympics, and to whom you Aunt Eunice, your cousin Maria, and I dedicated our lives to serving—with your decades long laundry list of lies about the link between Vaccines and Autism.

Those bold-face lies — disproved by dozens of medical studies — resulted in the loss of the medical license by Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher who originated and propagated the destructive anti-vaxxer propaganda. You knew that at the time you started peddling that pernicious propaganda, and you certainly know it now. To continue to spread those lies, and grotesquely try to repeat them concerning COVID-19—a disease which killed 1.2 million Americans—is unconscionable. Stop it.

I am ashamed that you knowingly disseminated and profited from peddling such widely disproven, and damaging, lies about a non-existent link between standard, childhood MMR vaccines and autism, blocking legitimate research and treatment for autism for many years. By intentionally spreading such ignorance, you personally caused direct harm to many of the same marginalized communities — communities of color, the poor, and the disabled — that I spent my lifetime championing. Didn’t you learn anything from our dining room table conversations about the special responsibilities we had?

Secondly, your candidacy for President is of grave concern to me, as it it to every other member of our family, who have all solidly backed Joe Biden. Biden, a good, fair and compassionate man, has governed in a conciliatory, pragmatic progressive tradition to benefit working families—much as I would have done—and, right now, he is a necessary bulwark against the anti-democratic, nationalistic, nihilistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-women, anti-gay, and reactionary forces in this country and around the world. He may well be the last best hope for Democracy, and for decency. How could you undermine that, and play into the hands of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn—all convicted felons, by the way—and of Vladimir Putin?

Your mother and I taught you respect for the Rule of Law, for Democracy and for the dignity of every human life. How could you not see that by taking even one-vote away from Joe Biden, you are pushing this country into the abyss of darkness, and turning it over to the forces of Fascism your Uncle John and I gave up our lives fighting? Why are you trashing all the good work we tried to do during our brief time in public office?

And, while I have your attention, that choice you made for your running mate is completely looney-tunes. She met a billionaire at a Yoga Retreat, had his baby, took some of his money and then dumped him when she had sex with another billionaire? And she used her multi-millions to spread more lies about vaccines, and to purchase a place on your national ticket? Really, Bobby? What are you doing? I can understand your wanting to act out a bit of a subconscious Oedipal plot aimed at me for abruptly leaving you at such a tender age, but do you really want to send your 96-year old mother to her grave? Snap out of it!

Third, that cringe-worthy book for which you wrote the forward, entitled, “The Real Anthony Fauci”, has been adopted as gospel by the John Birch Society, Q-Anon, and every other anti-government wacko on the extreme Right Wing, including the Republicans running the present House of Representatives. Do you really believe that the life-saving work of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates was meant to “ put humanity under totalitarian rule,” and “must be stopped? Who ARE you?

The Craig Newmark Center’s Poynter Institute—which has done some outstanding work in public health and public policy I would have strongly supported— reported that you are “one of the biggest sources of anti-vaccine rhetoric today.”

Worse, McGill University’s Office of Science & Society —at one of Canada’s leading Medical Universities—has called you “one of the princes of the anti-vaccine movement, if not its king.” What have you become?

As if all of this deeply damaging behavior on your part wasn’t enough, Bobby, you gutted me when you testified before the Louisiana House Oversight Committee during the height of the COVID pandemic, and opposed a proposal requiring public school students to be vaccinated. Your reckless actions took by breath away: my son, my namesake, crusading against a proven public-health measure that has historically protected people of color.

You had to know that more than 50% of the public school students in Louisiana are students of color — precisely the demographic that had the highest rates of COVID infections, and death. Were you consciously undermining everything your mother and I taught you to fight for? Everything shred of public service and the public good that the Kennedy family has stood for?

Didn’t it matter to you, Bobby, that the rabid Right Wing groups you are now working with are the very same pernicious people who have always opposed more funding for health care for the poor, for working families, for mental health services, and for the disabled? Doesn’t it matter to you that those actions are costing the lives of the most vulnerable among us?

I know you have questions about whether Sirhan Sirhan acted alone in murdering me, Bobby, but whether he did or not, your unhinged actions and life-threatening lies against the people for whom I fought, are doing a far more thorough job of assassinating my legacy than Sirhan ever could.

I will always love you, my son, and will always believe in the power of redemption, and in your ability to turn toward the light, instead of pulling the country down into a wormhole of darkness and despair.

Love,

Your father.

Many of us have much to be thankful for, and we express it to those we love, and to others, every day. Too many of our fellow humans do not, and it’s urgent to acknowledge that truth.

(Mahmoud Ajjour, a Gazan boy, who went back to rescue his family after Israeli shells began falling on their home, and lost his arms in his heroic attempt. He is 9 years old, the age of my youngest granddaughter. He told the New York Times: “My biggest wish now is to get prosthetics.” Photo by Samar Abu Elouf, appearing in the November 25, 2024, New York Times.)

Please do not avert your eyes.

Try hearing the cries of 9 year olds,

Like Mahmoud,

Who is not blessed with food, like you

And if he were, his mother would have to feed him.

It’s why I’m not grateful for hateful acts of war

And inhumanity, such grotesque profanities,

Demonizing differences, destroying children,

Like 14,000 dead in Gaza, many under 5 years old,

Ten times the number of Israelis killed or raped or kept.

As Jews, we used to think we were better than that,

But we are not, and we continue to delude ourselves

That we were Chosen to Repair the World,

While we turn tens of thousands of our babies,

The world’s children, into amputees or corpses.

No, I cannot give “Thanks” to a world led by

Tyrants or cranks, who deny the existence of laws,

Of war, or peace, or time,

And defy the courts of justice

Which find them guilty of such crimes.

No, I’m not grateful for the hateful,

Who spew their bile,

Over the face of a child,

And delight in the sickly vapor of their own

Vile cruelty, which, after a while,

Becomes the entire point of their actions.

As Americans we used to think we were better than that,

But we are not, yet we continue to delude ourselves

That we are A Promised Land.

Instead we are nothing but a trench between two Oceans,

Filled with the stench of broken promises,

Deeply scarred by the darkening hues of hate.

I will not give “Thanks” or “Gratitude”

For a world gone mad with the attitude,

That only a select few have a right

To health or wealth or life or love,

And believe that any God, on earth or above,

Would bless such evil,

Or leave the task of deciding who shall live

Or who shall die, to shallow beings who do not care,

And cannot comprehend what any of it means.

Stop whining and wringing your hands. DO SOMETHING TODAY. Save our Services (S0S) Non-Profit Organizations deliver to our communities every single day.

(Screenshot from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, November 18, 2024)

Today may be the day when the food bank down the street from you—which keeps hundreds of your neighbors from starving to death each week—could be declared to be a “terrorist organization,” and wiped out.

Insane, you say? 

Well that’s what pro-Trump Republicans (and a few too many Democrats) are considering on the floor of the House of Representatives today.

Yes, TODAY.  Not after January 20, 2025, although I’m sure they’ll try to sneak it past us then, too.    But TODAY.  

I don’t want to hear your excuses, or your despair, or the empty words that “it doesn’t matter.”  And, please, don’t tell me you are too busy to do it.  The grandchild you may save from going hungry might be your own; the young woman you save from having her insides butchered could be your sister; the religious institution where you worship just might be the one being threatened with closure. Yes, really.

For starters, you need to  IMMEDIATELY  contact your local Member of Congress that they MUST oppose H.R. 9495 which is coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives sometime today.  This should take no more than 5 minutes of your time.

You don’t even have to spend time thinking of what to say.  Here’s your script:

“Hi my name is [Your Name], and I’m your constituent living in (town]. I’m calling to urge you to oppose H.R. 9495, scheduled for a vote later today.

This bill poses a direct threat to nonprofits by granting the Treasury Secretary and the IRS unchecked power to label organizations as “terrorist supporting” and strip their tax-exempt status.

 Even worse, this can happen without evidence or any requirement to disclose the reasons for the designation. The lack of due process and accountability leaves nonprofits defenseless against vague and potentially politically motivated accusations.

 If this bill passes, a Treasury Secretary, guided by a grudge-bearing President could use the IRS to strip ANY non-profit organization of their tax-exempt protection to provide healthcare service, feed the hungry, care for the disabled, protect our rivers and oceans, give legal aid to those who can’t afford expensive lawyers, or shut down any religious institution– Church, Synagogue or Mosque—they don’t like.

Please oppose H.R. 9495 to protect nonprofit organizations and the essential services they provide to each of us in our communities. Thank you for your time and consideration.”

Now, don’t relax if you live in  “Blue” State, and think that you have nothing to worry about.  This action would effect non-profits everywhere and anywhere in the United States.  And, some 52 Democrats from states like California, New York, Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Washington State—as well as key Democrats in some “Red” States—did not vote to kill this deadly bill the last time it came up for a vote earlier this month. Why?

Some were out campaigning and some, just didn’t read the entire bill, getting fooled by the deceptive, American-as-apple-pie title of it:  “ the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act.”

Who could be opposed to that?

Well, hardly anyone was opposed to THAT part of the bill, which took up only the first few paragraphs.   Then some GOP ghouls in the House of Representatives—taking their cue from the extreme playbook of Pogrom 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s Fourth Reich Manifesto—tried to pull a fast fraud.

 They sneakily slapped a provision onto the ass-end of the “Stop Terror Financing” Act, which  “authorizes broad and easily abused new powers for the executive branch. It grants the Secretary of the Treasury virtually unfettered discretion to designate a U.S. nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and to strip it of its tax-exempt status…”

Wonder where they got THAT idea?

Look no further than Page 4 of Project (Pogrom) 2025, written by many of the people Trump is now pumping into his in-coming administration.  This is actually what they said, concerning “woke” non-profits, in an eery projection of what they wanted to do to the Civic (non-profit) sector:

“Today, the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject “woke” progressivism.  They will soon turn to Christian Schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.  The next Conservative President must make the institutions of American Civil Society hard targets for “woke” culture warriors.  This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights…out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant and piece of legislation that exists.”

As if that wasn’t blatant enough, The Non-Profit Law Professor’s Blog underscored Project 2025’s clarion call for “the next conservative Administration to implement policies to counter the growth of “woke,” “leftist”, or “left-leaning non-profits.” 

The Propagandists of Pogrom 2025 gave us an even more concrete clue on page 837, when they specifically targeted the Consumer Financial  Protection Bureau for elimination.

The apologists for the corporate interests behind Pogrom 2025 were apoplectic in their rabid attacks on the pro-consumer agency created by Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren in 2010 to reduce exploitative junk fees charged by banks, credit card companies and mortgage lenders– which has saved American taxpayers some $21 billion as of this May. 

Sounding like they were ranting from the Reichstag, the Pogrom 2025 authors called the CFPB:  “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist non-profits, politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.” 

That “creation” of the CFPB passed by a 20-vote margin in the US, Senate, 59-39, on May 20, 2010, meaning that both Republicans and Democrats combined to “spearhead its creation.”  They did it by comfortably passing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act of 2009, which by Congressional action created the CFPB, and saved millions of Americans from suffering from another Great Depression, following the financial collapse of 2008. 

Pogrom 2025 continued its’ jihad against the CFPB (on page 837) by slamming it as “a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party,” and “bankrolling some 60 liberal non-profits.”

In the eyes of the propagandists behind Pogrom 2025, saving 300 million average Americans from financial disaster was “leftist,” and “liberal,” despite the fact that most of the bailout funds from Dodd-Frank went to the giant financial institutions which caused the financial crisis, and are funding the Heritage Foundation.

Dangerously, the tell in these terrible present-day efforts to eviscerate non-profits they don’t agree with, is that Project 2025’s totalitarians have tipped their hand as to what their true agenda is after January 20, 2025, when the “Conservative Administration” of their dreams come to power.  It has clearly framed our fight for existence ahead.

They want to destroy any power that a strong, vibrant, service-oriented civic society may have in rural communities, cities, towns, states and nationally by defunding non-profit organizations they perceive as a threat to them, as if we’re going to thrown cans of peas at them from behind the card-tables at a food bank.

All it takes, in their squinty, evil eyes, is to control the IRS, and wipe out the non-profit status of those religious, social, cultural, fraternal, health-related, and community-serving non-profits they define as “leftist” or “terrorist.”

Today’s battle over protecting non-profit organizations which impact hundreds of millions of lives, is a warm-up of the bigger struggles coming next year and the years ahead, for a more livable, humane and just society.  In the Darwinian world view of Pogrom 2025’s progenitors that’s blasphemy, no matter how well-intentioned or effective.

Ironically, the more these amoral, shrivel-souled ideologues cut from government programs, the greater the need for non-profit organizations to stitch together the safety net, and save lives.  Unless, of course, they intentionally don’t want to save those lives.

We must start by beating back H.R. 9495 today if we are to galvanize our forces to fight again tomorrow.   Call you Member of Congress NOW, and demand that they save the life and death services provided by non-profit organizations in your schools, on your block, in your community and across the country.

What good is mouthing empty rhetoric about “honoring our Veterans,” when this country voted for a leader who dishonors them with every breath he takes.

NOV 11, 2024

(My father, Alphonse Villano, “courting” my mother, Margaret DeSimone, in 1939, before they were married, and before my father went off to fight against Fascism in WWII.)

My father was an Anti-Fascist,

A child of immigrants

who worshipped free elections,

And not some flaccid erections of impotent potentates,

Who pump themselves up

On the deaths of humans and institutions great,

Unlike themselves.

My father curses you from his grave,

You bottom-sucking losers, depraved

Beyond redemption, not to mention how

Deprived you are of any shards of soul,

You democracy desecrating domestic terrorists.

My father didn’t want to leave three kids

But yet he did, to fight the Fascists and keep

Us safe from hate-filled fanatics, intent

On killing mothers & babies, and tearing them apart.

My wife’s uncle, at 20, had reasons plenty to stay home

And not run off to Rome, to spend his youth fighting Nazis

So uncouth they pissed on Jewish graves, including his own,

Dug deep into Europe’s hills, before The War was won.

And now, you smirk, you feces-smearing Trumpholes,

White faces contorted into masks of hate, voices vicious howls,

To tear down the democratic fortress Our Fathers’ blood sealed,

Defeating & containing anti-democrats for 75 years,

You chin-thrusting shills for criminals & cretins, you pig squeals.

My father and other fathers curse you from their graves,

You fucking, Fascist-loving inanities,

Depraved more than the jackals

Who feasted on the entrails of dead soldiers and civilians,

Growing fat, feasting on the flesh of humans,

In the crassness and crapulence of your full inhumanity.

Our Fathers of democracy’s fortune,

Curse you from their graves — you failures;

Knowing the courage of their brave friends,

Who, of all colors and faiths,

Came together for a cause,

Not simply for revenge, profit or applause,

But to save the world,

From avaricious, grotesque garbage pails like you.

My Father was an Anti-Fascist,

As were 300,000 of his brothers who perished,

And 700,000 more who bore bullets in their spines & rumps,

Fighting to save his loves, from soul-less terrorists,

Pissing in the halls of Congress,

Like Nazis desecrating synagogues,

Taking orders from deranged demagogues.

My father, your father, our fathers

Were Anti-Fascists, and Anti-Racists,

Who believed that by fighting hate anywhere,

The threat to life and love could be kept from everywhere.

So how dare we, abandon the cause, forget their cost,

And yield our freedom, our breath, to those already lost?

The overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, the earthquake for fundamental human rights ripped away by Trump & his trolls, and an extremist hate campaign vs. women, will elect Kamala Harris President.

---

I walked up to a a group of women waving “Harris/Walz” banners this weekend, joyous over what they sensed was happening.

They carried home made signs stating: “Real Men Vote Harris,” “Roe, Roe, Roe Your Vote,” “I’m Not Going Back to 1950”, and “When We Fight We Win.” Cars drove by, with drivers honking car horns, and passengers waving in support.

I was wearing my “White Dudes for Harris” baseball cap, and a rainbow-colored“Ka-Ma-La” button on my sweatshirt. The women let out a big cheer when they saw me, and I thanked them, and said, “We are ALL going to win!”

I chatted with a number of pro-Harris supporters who, while enthusiastic, expressed some nervousness about the outcome of the election. I said that I believed Harris/Walz would win at least 320 Electoral Votes and Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and keep control of the US Senate—defeating both Donald Trump AND Ted Cruz in the same election— if we kept working hard up until the last vote is counted.

What these women understood, and what many male political pundits, and polls (with the exception of the latest poll out of Iowa conducted by a highly regarded woman pollster) were failing to see, was that this was the culmination of a decades long-rumbling revolution, which would no longer be postponed: Women were not going to tolerate the denial of their rights anymore, and would take control of the levers of power to guarantee that themselves.

Many of these same women, and their male allies, marched together on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s Inauguration, in defiance of the election of the most extreme, misogynistic, racist & rhetorically violent President in US history. In small towns, as well as larger cities across the nation, thousands upon thousands of women of all ages, races and backgrounds marched arm in arm along with men who would fight to our last breath for our partners, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and friends.

Together we fought every anti-democratic action, every violent utterance (and as would later be proven in the E. Jean Carroll case —Trump’s abusive physical actions) against women, and every one of Trump’s anti-Roe. v. Wade appointments to the US Supreme Court and other federal courts. Kamala Harris, then our Senator from California, led those fights for women’s rights, as a fearless member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her leadership on the issue prompted Joe Biden to select her as his choice for Vice President in 2020.

Roe had been a brilliant judicial balancing act of a woman’s right to make her own decisions about reproductive rights, decided 51 years ago. It found practical, medically supported common ground for a fundamental individual right: splitting the legally permissible period for an abortion between competing religious and personal beliefs. Many Christians believed that life began at conception; while Jewish law emphasized the supremacy of the existing life of the woman, requiring abortion as a necessary medical procedure if the life of the woman was ever at risk, even up to the moment of birth. Roe v. Wade established a careful legal and medical procedure to be followed.

From Shirley Chisholm to Bella Abzug, Sandra Day O’Conner to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, many devoted much of our adult lives to achieving equal rights for women, and dismantling the rotting infrastructure of discriminatory laws which dating back over 200 years.

For me, the clarity and simplicity of a woman’s right to fundamentally make decisions about her own body, came down to a Hula Hoop and a large, white bedroom pillow, with a leather belt tied tightly around its’ waist to underscore the question of when life actually begins.

That visual image and message were implanted in my brain 54 years ago, when I sat in the New York State Senate gallery, witnessing the live debate on New York’s liberalized abortion law, enacted in 1970.

I was a 21-year old Legislative Assistant that spring in Albany, and marveled at how a liberal Republican State Senator from Manhattan, Roy Goodman, had perfectly framed the issue of when, precisely, life began.

“Imagine this is the unfertilized egg,” Goodman said, holding up a Hula Hoop for all to see.  Then, with his other hand he held up a white bedroom pillow, with a leather belt tied around the pillow’s middle. 

“And, imagine this is a sperm cell, looking for an egg to fertilize,” Goodman smiled, knowing all eyes were riveted on him.  Laughter rippled throughout the gallery where I sat.  Think Woody Allen’s parachuting sperm in his movie “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.”

Goodman began to guide the “pillow”—with its leather spermatozoa tail– into the opening of the Hula Hoop.

“At what point does actual life begin?” he bellowed throughout the Senate Chamber?  “Here?” He brought the belted pillow across the bottom of the Hula Hoop.

“Here?” he pushed it all the way through.  “Or, someplace else, way down the road?”

Goodman’s brilliant and simple illustration of a complicated question was clear to everyone.  If a potential life began immediately at conception, what about the life of a sperm cell or an egg before conception?  How far back before conception were religious fundamentalists willing to go to mark the “potential” for life?  Pre-ejaculation?  Pre-menstrual cycle?  He reduced the anti-abortion absolutists screed to the theatre of the absurd, with the help of a Hula Hoop, a pillow, a leather belt and common sense.

The New York State Legislature settled on 6 months after the moment of conception, as the precise time of fetal viability, despite the fact that Senator Goodman’s own Jewish faith taught that life did not begin until the moment of birth.  It would be three more years before Roe v. Wade settled upon that same 6-month standard. 

The most liberal abortion law in the nation—following 142 years of New York having one of the most restrictive statutes—was an early earthquake for women’s rights, the right to privacy, and the guarantee for women of equal protection under the law, to exercise a legally protected right of personal control over their own bodies.  At last, it was actual life—the woman’s life—not the promise of “potential life,” that mattered.

“Suddenly, New York had the most liberal abortion law in the world, ” said Dr. Alan Guttmacher, a leading pioneer in the field of birth control.  Other states—Hawaii, Washington and Alaska—quickly followed suit, passing similar laws before Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Roe clearly drew upon those State Legislative legal precedents and practical experience.

But that was not all. Writing after the repeal of Roe in a New Yorker article entitled “What’s Missing from Alito’s Decision to Revoke the Right to Abortion,” following the majority decision written by US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Jessica Winter noted that : 

“No State law outlawed marital rape until 1975; no man was found liable for sexual harassment until 1977; and, pregnancy was a fireable offense until 1978.”

Ironically, the most recent change in the Rape Laws of New York State, passed earlier this year, is directly attributable to Donald Trump’s legal conviction for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll.

After 12 years of failed attempts, New York State revised it’s Penal Code in early 2024, with the State’s first female Governor Kathy Hochul signing the new law and declaring “Rape Is Rape,” expanding the technical legal definition of “rape” well beyond the old, parochial parameters of “vaginal penetration by a penis.”

And none of it could have been done, without a hand from Donald Trump–or, more accurately, a few of his teeny, chubby fingers and, what may or may not have been, a flaccid penis.  

Mere days after Trump was found guilty, this year, by a unanimous jury, for repeatedly sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll to the tune of $83 million (on top of the $5 million he already lost to her) New York State moved its Rape Law into the 21^st Century and into compliance with federal law, practice, and most modern law-enforcement definitions of rape.

The new law—which should, perhaps be named, “The Trump Middle Finger Rape Law,” broadens the definition of “Rape” to include nonconsensual anal, oral and vaginal sexual contact.  That means that whether the perp (Trump) forcibly used his or her fingers, a sex toy, a baton or anything else, or his penis in any penetration of a vaginal, oral or anal opening—on a woman or a man—the sex offender is guilty of rape.

New York State’s new definition of rape makes it comport with Federal standards, including those of the FBI, established under former FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2012, whose Uniform Crime Reports define rape as:

“penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

It took Trump’s adjudicated sexual assault of Carroll, and the first woman Governor in New York State’s history, to change New York’s archaic rape law. If that isn’t a direct example of a specific act of violence against a woman, having a real and revolutionary effect on the law, nothing is.

Now, the continuing acts of violence against the individual and constitutional rights of millions of women in the United States, led by Donald Trump, perpetrated by Donald Trump, his judicial appointees, fanatical Christian Nationalists, and cult-like followers in some individual States, are finally, finally, being held to account.

With Trump’s anti-Roe appointees to the Supreme Court blowing up such a carefully balanced, fundamental right for women, it unleashed two revolutions:

1. Far right lawmakers and Governors in 21 States around the country exposed their own Taliban-like jihad against womens’ basic freedoms, by passing extremist Trump Abortion Bans which imposed severe penalties upon women and their health care providers. Those draconian statutes exacted punitive, and—in some cases deadly—penalties for women’s health procedures as medically straightforward as saving a woman’s life post-miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies, having a standard D & C procedure, or as morally clear and personal a matter as not wanting to bear a child out of rape or incest;

2. The political power of women—young, old, black, brown, white, straight or lesbian—building for decades— exploded into the open, and will no longer be held back at the State or Federal levels anymore.

State after state, including many so-called “Red States” like Kansas & Ohio passed constitutional amendments enshrining into law a women’s right to make her own healthcare decisions. Ballot initiatives were passed overwhelmingly with bi-partisan support.

This year alone, two full years after the repeal of Roe by the Trump Supreme Court, another 10 States, have women’s Reproductive Rights initiatives on their statewide ballots, appearing on the very same ballot with the election for President: : Those States are:

• Arizona, Proposition 139;
• Colorado, Amendment 79;
• Florida, Amendment 4;
• Maryland, Question 1;
• Missouri, Amendment 3;
• Montana, Ballot Issue, 14;
• Nebraska, Initiative 439;
• Nevada, Question 6;
• New York, Proposition 1;
• South Dakota, Constitutional Amendment G.

Among those states, six have hotly contested Senate, and House, races in which the issue of Women’s Reproductive Rights may well determine control of Congress. Those states, and their US Senate candidates favoring restoring women’s Reproductive Rights include: Arizona, Reuben Gallego (v. Kari Lake); Florida, Debbie Mucarsel Powell (v. Rick Scott); Maryland, Angela Alsobrook (v. Larry Hogan); Missouri, Lucas Kunce (v. Josh Hawley;), Montana, JonTester, (v. Tim Sheehy;), and Nevada, Jacky Rosen (v. Sam Brown).

Additionally, in Texas, strongly pro-choice candidate Colin Allred, is expected to unseat long-time Women’s Rights opponent Ted Cruz, who has crusaded for a national abortion ban.

Kamala Harris’ election as the first woman President of the United States, is not something which “just fell out of a coconut tree.” It is a monumental movement for human rights, individual dignity and personal freedom which has been growing, and building strength, for a very long time.