Heather Ann Thompson

Up will become down, down will become up.

And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today.

So glad to be here.

Well, in part because the really striking thing about this event at the time and as it's been remembered since is that the story is all about him.

The story is about writing the justification for what he did on that subway so many decades ago and so much so that I am really embarrassed actually to say that when I –

began to think about this case again, I didn't know the names of the teenagers he'd shot.

And I suspected that I was not alone, that there was a complete erasure, actually, of the serious victims of this crime.

He was the youngest child of a quite strict father and quite domineering father.

He grew up in rural New York, clearly felt alone, a bit picked on by his peers as a child.

And I think from the very beginning was exhibiting a problem with authority and feeling misunderstood and anger and all of those things.

But I also was struck by the way in which that was not the explanatory thing that we might think it was.

Yes, he was a loner and he

was an electronics nerd who lived by himself and worked for himself in part because he had a difficulty, I think, getting along with others.

But on the other hand, he was a guy who would step outside of his apartment in the 1980s New York and just be so irritated and angered at the garbage piling up on the stoop and the sex trade going on.

on street corners and the scores of people suffering the ever-deepening AIDS epidemic.

And he felt a degree of abandonment and fury by that and saw all of it as the fault of a liberal do-gooder government.

that was not taking care of business, not cleaning things up.

And in that sense, he was this every man, white American who was feeling dislocated and discombobulated by the time of the 70s and ever more so as the austerity of the 80s kicked in.

I remember it.

Many of us do.