I'm getting toward the end of this yearlong project, and so I'm doing sort of an informal mental assessment of where it has been going, and one idea that I keep coming back to is that one of the stark contrasts that this year has with the first year of mixed media daily (that would be 2011) is that this year has been one of incredibly dark subject matter, pretty much wall to wall. And then, as if to punctuate this thought, who shows up on the front page? Charles fucking Manson. Not for any new horrendous thing he did, but simply because he died. And so we get his obit, and by extension, his life story, which is essentially a shit show from the day he was born. It's certainly a cautionary tale about the dangers of an utterly broken social welfare system. If we, as a country, don't take care of our institutions, be it the juvenile justice system or our system of free and fair elections, they are more likely then not to breed some monster.
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