Charles Manson is dead

A man who, like Hitler, became the epitome of evil during my lifetime.  Growing up, he was everyone's favorite bogeyman.   Donald McClarey has a thoughtful and insightful piece.

I don't wish him ill, but then it's easy for me not to.  As I told my congregation after the 9/11 attacks, I defer all calls for mercy and love to those directly impacted by his evil.  They are the heroes of the faith.  It costs me nothing to say I forgive him.  He didn't do anything to me. I'll leave that to those whose lives he forever destroyed.

Nonetheless, he was a driving force of evil, and symbolized the worst of that generation lost in space.  If nothing else, I work on forgiving the manifold evils and idiocies that came from the era that produced Manson, for those, far more than Manson himself, have had a detrimental impact on me, my generation and my children's generation.