Look at Manson and his family and Helter Skelter. Think about Sun Myung Moon and two-thousand couples being matched up and married off at Madison Square Garden. Consider Heaven’s Gate and trying to catch up with a UFO being chased by a comet.

Where are these crazies?

Now, you have to be Harold Shipman just to get noticed among the lunatics and terrorists and school shootings.

You probably don’t even know who David Miscavige is.

And you think it’s easier to recruit the nobodies, that there’s nothing to them, that they are the menial workers, the drop-outs. That they are somehow weaker.

You’re wrong. Anybody can feel like a nobody. Like the thing they are doing doesn’t matter. Like they wouldn’t be missed by anyone if they were gone.

And it’s not just the recent batch of entitled millennials, who want everything and want it now and for no effort. It’s not just women looking at magazine covers and feeling overweight and ugly. It’s their parents, too. Feeling inadequate as social-media personas illustrate the perfectly content lives of everyone around them. When they are seeing loving marriages and family get-togethers and time spent active or with grandchildren or pets. When people have time to work and look after each other and take pictures of the cakes they have baked and iced with their delicately manicured and creative hands.

And their own parents, who can’t keep up with the pace of technology and feel that the youth of today have no concept or respect for what they have lived through. And their diets are so poor that they have diabetes and pills that counteract the effects of the pills they already take every day.

Starting a cult is easier than ever.

Because people want a way out of their lives; they want it to be simple. A tablet that will melt all the fat so they don’t have to work hard at the gym or quit bacon. Or some medication prescribed by a lazy doctor that will perk up your mood and mask your pain or aid your insulin production so that you can still scoff donuts.

There’s cognitive behavioural therapy.

And neuro-linguistic programming.

And everyone’s a whack job because they can be or because it’s somehow cool.

They are crying out for their brains and their souls to be washed.

And it degrades the thoughts and feelings of those who are truly suffering.

It’s the people who, actually, want to die that should be allowed to live.

Now, everybody is a little bit crazy, so to cut through all the depression and morbid obesity and cars ploughing through crowds of civilians, you have to put nine people on a bridge with ropes around their necks just to be heard.

12

233 – YOUNG LEVANT

‘Maybe Sunday.’ That’s what he says.

Maybe we’ll talk more openly on Sunday.