Pacificapocalypse

“We are made to believe when we cannot understand, and to obey so that we will never understand”

It’s been 30 years, and I still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that a bunch of crazy people had killed themselves in some jungle somewhere. I was at the now closed James D. Phelan middle school in San Jose, and I had just turned 11 years old.

Crazy people in a jungle somewhere.

That’s all I knew then, but as time progressed and the story unfolded, I and the rest of the world, learned how absolutely bug shit insane the situation was.

I still don’t understand what really happened. There is, and always will be, a strong San Francisco connection to the People’s Temple. The majority of his followers came from Hunters Point, Bay View and Vis Valley and they still have relatives here. He had his fingers in City Hall and was courted and valued by politicians, as a guaranteed ‘vote getter’. So perhaps that’s why, people, good people, looked the other way (shame on you Chronicle, you fucking knew better) when word got out, before they fled to the jungle, that things were going very wrong inside the People’s Temple.
What force drives, what are to all expectations, reasonably intelligent people, to give up their lives, their homes and deny their families and move to a jungle, an absolutely primitive campsite really, thousands of miles away on an entirely different continent.
What makes committing, logically and methodically an incredibly illogical and insane act, seem reasonable?
They killed their children. They squirted the Kool-Aid down their throats and killed their children.

Kool-Aid in a jungle or new Nikes in San Diego. Something moves these people to commit these horrific acts.I don’t think I’ll ever understand, and frankly I’m not entirely convinced that I want to understand what drives these people.

There’s a lot of info out there; here’s a good place to start.
Jonestown 30 Years Later - SFGate.com