Victims of a Commodified Society by David Morgan
On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam, an off-duty police officer working in private security who served as a building guard and management employee. The gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, aged twenty-seven, ended his own life after the attack. Like so many similar incidents, this was not merely another chapter in the relentless American cycle of gun violence…It has now become, at least for this writer, a parable of what happens when people are reduced to functional market value and usage: a world where human beings come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as assets or failures, winners to be rewarded or discards to be forgotten.
