At the risk of making everyone think that I have a creepy obsession with anniversaries of mass death...
...it was 25 years ago today that 913 followers of Jim Jones committed mass suicide in Guyana.
(Here's an overview of the events from students at Rice University, and a site that includes source material and personal information from former cult members and families at San Diego State. Also, a Google search on "Jonestown" can keep you busy for hours.)
This is not a date that's burned in my memory or anything. I just happened to see a news item about a memorial service being held by survivors in California. In previous years a friend of mine has e-mailed me reminders because he swears I've called Jonestown my first news memory.
It isn't. (Watergate is.) Jonestown was the first news story that I remember actually following, though...reading the articles in the paper, buying news magazines, paying attention to the news on tv.
[I've seen more graphic photographs since then, but none disturbed me the ways these did. On the off chance that you remember the Jonestown pictures and don't want to see them again, that's what the hyperlinks in the next paragraph are.]
I can remember so vividly the covers of Time and Newsweek on a rack at the drugstore.
The initial pictures were bad, but worse were the pictures that came after the first layer of bodies were removed, the pictures of the kids in front of the tub of cyanide-laced punch.
We thought it was grape Kool Aid. I've heard since that it wasn't, just some generic drink mix...but a kids' drink. I haven't had grape drink since then, either. It makes me think of the pictures.
I'm pretty sure the reason I read those news stories was because they were, in part, about kids. Watergate and Vietnam were adults. The election was about adults. Even the fall of Saigon, which I remember seeing on tv, with people trying to hang on to the helicopters as they took off, wasn't relevant to me.
I remember a Thanksgiving Day exercise for school that year: list things for which you are thankful. I remember mine: that I didn't live in Jonestown.
Posted by Nic at November 18, 2003 02:36 PM | TrackBack