Doomsday

Until a few years ago I laughed at the words, “don’t drink the Kool Aid.” Although I did not understand the reference, I imagined what it could mean. In my mind I had created stories of someone slipping GHB or disgusting bodily fluids into an, otherwise, normal glass of Kool Aid. It was only after I saw a documentary on Jonestown a few months that I realized that 909 people died in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, and that many of these victims drank grape-flavored Kool Aid that was laced with potassium cyanide. Jim Jones, the “father” of this movement had already held various suicide drills in this negative Utopia that was Jonestown before the actual event. The picture below was seared into my mind the night I watched the film and I still have trouble looking at it.

(Taken from http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2008/jonestown/jonestown_06.jpg

There were a few excerpts from his speech (call to suicide) that, I felt, relate to our assignments from this week: (transcript from http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Tapes/Tapes/DeathTape/death.html watch this for speech):

1. I want to go–I want to see you go, though…. It’s not to be afeared. It is not to be feared. It is a friend. It’s a friend … sitting there, show your love for one another. Let’s get gone.

Strozier says in his Apocalypse that Evangelicals tend to like to imagine their death as part of a group (67). This explicit desire that he has to see others die with him is perverse but, in a way, very common. Here, he calls dying together a show of love. Moreover, he says that the group must die in peace because they cannot live in peace. He paints death itself as a sort of rapture.

2. Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to death…. It’s just stepping over to another plane. Don’t be this way. Stop this hysterics…. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity. We must die with some dignity. We will have no choice. Now we have some choice.…

The choice that Jim Jones is referring to, the choice of not having to face the real consequences of the world around him, reminds me of the “Duck and Cover” video. Here, children are being told that if they just “duck and cover” when they see a flash (even if all they have to cover themselves with is a thin piece of cloth or paper) that they will be able to escape the horrors of an atomic blast. Obviously, in this situation, neither the children nor their parents have any real agency when it comes to their mortality, this video gives them a false choice. Jones is feeling a similar sense of loss of control and decides to escape what he sees as apocalyptic through suicide