Heather Ann Thompson

really kind of retreated from the public eye for all kinds of understandable reasons.

And so without talking to them, I thought, you know, I don't want to talk to the shooter.

I want to let that moment in the past tell itself.

I think he's on the one hand a very complicated figure because when I began to dig into his own biography, it is a troubled biography, I think, by any estimation.

He was the youngest child of a clearly quite strict family.

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 raised rather sternly.

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

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

And in that sense, he was this everyman 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.