Hello, 2025. Goodbye 2024. For some it is “good riddance” 2024. That attitude is not at all surprising. Many families and individuals struggled financially in 2024. Recession. Inflation. Less than a living wage amid the increasing wealth gap. Lots of people wishing for better in 2025, as each new year, inherently, brings hope for better lives. Hope is certainly better than despair, but hope needs action and a shared sense of purpose to improve the chances of positive change.

History shows a united effort can bring positive results. With the right leadership, collectively wrongs can be righted. But getting the collective to believe they can succeed is never easy. Push needs to come to shove, and then the many need to do the shoving against the very powerful few who selfishly support the status quo as they live in privileged cocoons of comfort. This many vs few is evident in class warfare that divides and conquers, as intended. Scapegoating and race-baiting weakens unity.

Irrefutably, we are all human, if not the same race or gender. Of course. But human differences are apparently hard to ignore when it comes to getting the general public singing Kumbaya in sync. Many are the ills that haunt many of the public as the calendar turns to 2025. Not the least of which is our country’s unneeded for-profit health care industry.

Can we not all agree, healthcare is a human right? And so let us protest! If not starting with Kumbaya, then how about Fortunate Son or Fight the Power? Yeah, let’s get fired up and  gather round and watch a bonfire break out! Whimsy? Pie in the sky?  Who can spark that fire? Which leads me to invoke the name Luigi. No last name needed at this point, in my estimation. Luigi seems to have brought a large chunk of the diversified pubic together. If not Luigi, then whomever that was who performed a targeted hit on a major healthcare insurance company CEO a few weeks ago. For now, that “whomever” is Luigi. But it really doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. Well, it does matter. Except it really doesn’t. Because the person who was murdered represented a healthcare policy that in itself kills people. For profit. That fact cannot be denied, although Luigi Whomever has yet to be proven, factually, guilty of that single murder.

For many observers of this incident, a moral dilemma confronts their consciousness. Of course, murder is wrong. But in this case, the motivation for the killing of that CEO begs the question: is morality a relative term? As in, one dead health insurance CEO measured against the countless documented cases of a for-profit healthcare system that causes prolonged suffering and/or early death?

The CEO was, as caught on video, executed. It was a targeted killing. Assassinations have occurred throughout recorded history. Murder is always wrong, but targeted killings, in some instances, play a larger part in social evolution. Examined in terms of cause and effect, a targeted killing can be viewed as an impulsive act meant to weed out a destabilizing force.

Such murdering acts are a dark thread in humanity’s historical DNA. These types of killings are thought to serve a twofold purpose: protect social cohesion and norms by eliminating a certain kind of abusive, uncooperative person from the gene pool. In this line of reasoning, that CEO had, by orders of magnitude, far more blood on his hands than Luigi Whomever.

However one’s moral compass is set as far as humans killing one another, this “targeted killing” cannot be swept away as two wrongs not making a right. The for-profit healthcare system is, for millions of people, a literal non-healthcare system that places profit over people. It needs to be overhauled. The wealthiest country in the world should easily be healthiest country in the world.

“Where must we go, we who search this wasteland in search of our better selves?” George Miller, director of the Mad Max films.

2025 might–in the case of Luigi and the CEO– help answer that question.