35 Years, 918 Bodies: The Collateral of Jonestown
“There are some people who see a lot of God in my body.”-Jim Jones
November, for Americans at least, tends to be synonymous with Thanksgiving. This is the month many of us find it fashionable to talk about all we have to be grateful for, including friends, family and Facebook. What an ironic time of year for the 35th anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown in Guyana to roll around. On November 18, 1978, 918 men, women and children died for Jim Jones’ sins. Under Jones’ magnetic, pill-glazed glaze, men and women waited in line to drink a poisoned cherry-flavored beverage. Parents sincerely thanked Jim Jones for all he had done, and squirted poison into the mouths of their infant children. Families gulped poison together, dying together. (If that mad scene reminds you of Magda Goebbels determinedly poisoning her six children in the Führerbunker, declaring that her kinder wouldn’t want to live without her and the glory of National Socialism, you get an A for gruesome history.)
Almost a thousand people were murdered because Jim Jones spent his miserable life wanting to die; because Jones decided that the most exciting power to wield was the power to order people to kill themselves, knowing they’d do it. Do it gratefully, in fact. The night before at a compound-wide meeting, a man silenced a woman arguing for all their lives, telling her that she should be grateful: “Your life has been extended to the day that you’re standing there because of [Jones].”
918 men, women and children died because Jones had a miserable childhood of abuse by an alcoholic father; a childhood of poverty; a childhood of tormenting people and killing cats. Till one day, it wasn’t enough to torture small animals…he wanted the whole world to pay. And his world was the men and women who joined with him, lured by his message of racial equality, social justice and freedom.
Before we dismiss his followers, as “crazy,” “stupid,” or “gullible,” we should remember that the urge to live a life of meaning and value is universal. No one consciously joins a cult. Lonely people join fellowship. Lonely people join friendship. A way out of the prison inside their skulls. People join with other people to make a difference. And then slowly but surely that friendship denigrates into cheap parlor tricks, and two hours of sleep a night, a starvation diet and public humiliations. Not to mention the private humiliations: Jones slept with his followers, men and women, including the ones he drugged into unconsciousness, and had tied to their hospital beds. He wasn’t picky.
People join a cult to positively change the world and suddenly time passes, and one day you find yourself agreeing with Father that yes, you have to die, because he killed a politician, and the idea of life without him is meaningless and, incredibly, you’re squirting poison into your child’s mouth through a syringe. (Some of the older children were forcibly held down, crying, choking on syrupy poison.) For some people, life is something that just seems to happen to them. And what happened to them was that they met Jim Jones.
“If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act” –Chekhov
And Jim Jones despised himself…so could he lead his followers to anything but the poison packed in his luggage? How comforting he must have found the thought of all that powdered death. Jim Jones had people desperate to follow his leadership, and all he could lead them to was death. Imagine if he could have led them to joy. I think of Jones’ disgusting cowardice when I look at the photos of the dead, and see the tiny corpses of children; those tiny feet. Jones was a coward; he savored his misery and took those children with them.
My empathy for the victim of Jonestown is tempered by my disgust at people who surrender their power to someone else, expecting someone else to do a better job of living their lives than they can. I’ll be giving gratitude today (and every day) that I take full responsibility for my (many) mistakes. I’ll be thinking of the photos of the dead children at Jonestown, as a reminder of what can happen when we’d sooner believe an easy lie, rather than the hard truth.