host

I was sixteen....I followed the reporting of the murders closely, we were all fascinated about Manson, the connection with the Beatles song, the Manson "family" at the Spahn ranch, Polanski....his later being accused of underaged sex....avoided return to the US to face charges..... six years later....Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme sticks a gun into president Ford....it failed to fire.....

Sensationalized....hyped....ala "Tanya"....aka kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, brainwashed by her captors into pariticpating in armed robbery of a bank....Symbionese Liberation army, the Harris's....

The point is....Susan Atkins served 39 years...she was probably as much under the influence of Manson as Patty Hearst was, under the Harris's....Atkins is old, one legged....dying..... the wrath posted here is odd.

The "non-wrath" reaction to a war that has killed six figures worth of innocent people, including 4,100 US troops, is an issue, and a symptom, just as the wrath posted here is.

I was as close to Atkin's crime as anyone my age or older who followed the reporting at the time was. I have no objection to her release, under the circumstances described. She has been cut no specific break by "the system", I doubt many know that the commutation or her sentence to life instead of execution was an automatic result of a US Supreme Court decision that declared the death penalty unconstitutional. When that ruling came. in 1973, every death sentence was commuted to life.

Atkins is not the most heinous murderer, and most posting "let her rot", are influenced by third hand accounts, as they were too young to witness second hand accounts.

The Tate-LaBianco murders took place in the year following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in a year when the Vietnam war was pressing several hundred thousand civilian males into the military, thousands of which would be killed, as they killed a multiple of their own numbers of dead, in numbers of Vietnamese.

That war turned out to be justified by an incident that we found did not even take place....the Gulf of Tonkin attacks on US Navy ships by North Vietnamese naval forces.....

Manson and the girls turned into folklore, and the elected leaders, those responsible for the REAL sensational numbers of lost innocent lives, did it the same way they're doing it now....via contrived, unneccessary war.

It won't stop until we adjust our misplaced sense of focus and outrage. If you want to get worked up about a perceived injustice, posting condemnations of this powerless, walking dead woman is not a sign that you are heading in the right direction.....

I cannot understand the strong reaction, but it is today's America:
The thread turned into a "no mercy" outpouring....IMO, a society with no capacity for mercy....one that reacts in a predictable, hardline fashion, is an ideal setup for supporting, or acting complacently to politicians who decide to wage contrived, aggressive war.

I don't recognize my own countrymen. When did it get so ugly and unforgiving towards the powerless, and so supportive of the most powerful, no matter how much they deceive the supporters and abuse their power.

I missed the part where we turned into who the majority demonstrate that they are now....