Now that madman Manson is finally dead, perhaps we can listen to some of what the evil monster had to say. His words weren’t all just the gibberish ranting of a malignant mind. His voice actually was the precursor — the miner’s canary, if you will — of the mass killings we are witnessing today on an almost weekly basis. He tried to warn us of what was to come, but we thought him insane, which he clearly was. But now we’re in the grips of a national insanity.
But because of how society treated him during his formative years, he knew what was coming. He knew that he wasn’t the only monster being created.
According to Associated Press reports, he was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 12, 1934, “to a teenager, possibly a prostitute; he was in reform school by the time he was eight” after being in a series of brutal foster homes. Sound somewhat familiar already, doesn’t it? To this day the outcome for children (especially boys) who age out of the sometimes uncaring foster care system in place in much of America is bleak indeed. Too many end up homeless or in prison in our supposedly great nation.
“After serving a 10-year sentence for check forgery in the 1960s, Manson was said to have pleaded with authorities not to release him because he considered prison home,” states the Associated Press. Again, a familiar refrain for those of us with familiarity with America’s carceral system. Fully one third of the individuals that have served sentences of over three years have become institutionalized, but virtually none of them are as forthright as Manson was. When he said he didn’t want to be released, someone should have listened; lives would have been spared.
“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,” he would later say in a rambling monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.” Like it or not, what he was saying was all too true.
“He was set free in San Francisco during the heyday of the hippie movement in the city’s Haight-Ashbury section, and though he was in his mid-30s by then, he began collecting followers — mostly women — who likened him to Jesus Christ. Most were teenagers; many came from good homes but were at odds with their parents,” states the Associated Press. Quite similar to today, where so many lost souls are deep into the drug culture and are searching for something to latch onto.
And after all, someone raised these troubled young individuals. Other dangerous Manson-like cults are extant today: We call them violent street gangs — lost souls seeking a charismatic leader.
“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children,” Manson said in a courtroom soliloquy, “you taught them; I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them …”
The parallels to today are chilling — strikingly chilling. As Linda Deutsch, the longtime courts reporter for the Associated Press who covered the Manson case said he “left a legacy of evil and hate and murder. He was able to take young people who were impressionable and convince them he had the answer to everything and he turned them into killers. It was beyond anything we had ever seen before in this country.”
But now, almost 50 years after the horrific incidents that occurred over a period of three days in 1969, we have been inured to violence. If the killings were to happen today we might simply shrug them off as just another day in America. We have mentally normalized violence — and perhaps we have done so as a mechanism to protect our sanity in a country going stark raving mad.
I’ll finish with this: The high point of the day for individuals behind bars is mail call. Jail house status is, to some degree, determined by how often your name is called, which signifies that someone on the outside cares enough about you to write. And the bone-chilling part of the Manson saga is that, a full four decades after his grisly deeds were done, the guards allegedly were still dragging in mail for Manson by the sack full — some with proposals of marriage — from his thousands of admirers from all over the world. In his mind he was deeply cared about.
Now how sick is that?
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.