Like most people, I learned about Jonestown through someone who only knew the broad strokes of the story. In 2006, my 7th grade English class had been reading a young adult dystopian novel by Lois Lowry entitled The Giver, when my teacher offered an example of a real-world case of a utopian society turned dystopian. It was, of course, a very abridged explanation of Jonestown.
A few weeks later, while watching TV with my dog in the loft of my parent’s house, I heard the eerie ring of a church bell that marks the beginning of Stanley Nelson’s, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple and realized it was the same story that my English teacher had told us about. I finished the documentary from beginning to end, riveted. I still had questions afterwards though, so I did what any 13-year-old would do to look for information in 2006: read every Wikipedia page I could find on the subject, from the principal players to the victims, to Peoples Temple’s humble beginnings in Indiana, to their grisly end in Guyana.
What stuck out to me the most at the time was the fact that the majority of the victims were from the Bay Area, where I grew up. I spent my early years in Concord, and later, when that town became too dangerous for my parents’ liking, my teen years in Brentwood. During the summertime my grandmother would pick up fresh fish from Oakland to make a savory, tart, Filipino soup called sinigang, while my dad would take us to hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants as a treat. My favorite aunt would take my brother and I with her to San Francisco on the BART every now and then so we could check out Japantown. And I can’t tell you how many times my parents drove past Filmore Street when we visited Fisherman’s Wharf.
It was mortifying at first, to learn that such a good cause that began with the best and brightest in the Bay Area ended with so much defilement…and a cynical punchline. More so it was heartbreaking realizing that all those people that walked the same sidewalks as I did, maybe even shopped at the same stores or ate at the same restaurants were long gone.
Californians have a bad rep in general. Either we’re too liberal or we’re not brave enough; too crazy or too politically correct. I was never ashamed, though, of being a Californian, and a Northern Californian at that (Even SoCals think we’re a ten on the crazy scale). In my mind, we were something the rest of the country wasn’t: crazy enough to dream. To hope. To create.
Those Peoples Temple members certainly were that. And knowing this, I couldn’t help but feel a little pride for them during those early years, despite how it ended. The dream they started with was a noble one. Insanity and avarice corrupted it until it became the grotesque horror we saw on TV.
About a year after Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple first aired on PBS, a docudrama entitled Jonestown: Paradise Lost was released on Netflix, which I saw along with an interview Stephan Jones did with Strombo on YouTube. When Stephan mentioned this website, I immediately started reviewing everything I could on the tragedy. I was on and off the website for the next couple of years, periodically checking in to see if there was any new information or discoveries from the Freedom of Information Act. It wasn’t until I entered military service in 2013, though, that the subject became relevant to me in real time, and I started to notice the haunting parallels – the similarities and differences – of Peoples Temple’s stories to mine, and what that said about us as a whole.
I was 18, fresh out of high school, with no money for college and nothing to look forward to except living with my parents, same as every other kid in Northern California in 2011. I had no friends, at least no one close enough to stick around for, no job prospects above working behind a cash register, and no promise that things would change. I needed change, even if it promised danger.
The military offers a different mission than the Temple, but in essence the same things were asked of us: dying for the cause and having absolute loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms; following orders without question; putting the missions needs over your own; pushing yourself physically and mentally to the brink. Bootcamp exemplified all of this and more, right down to how we kept each other accountable. We females had our own “catharsis” sessions in the early weeks of training, when we were still trying to get our footing and get used to one another.
Our Dorm Chief was put on the spot one night during an effort to clear the air and vent our grievances. It quickly devolved into a pseudo-Planning Commission meeting, in which the more verbose members of the flight began detailing all of Dorm Chief’s failings, weaknesses, and lack of experience in leading the flight. “L” was an 18-year-old white girl, one of the youngest among us, so for her to be made Dorm Chief was a slap in the face to some of the older members, especially in a predominantly Black flight. I still remember the defeated look on her face as she stood in front of everyone while they slung verbal abuse after abuse, tears slowly gliding down her cheeks.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that particular parallel. That difficult, emotion-filled night in February was a frustrated, misguided reaction to the stress everyone felt during that second week, finally surging through the flight like a bolt of lightning. “L” just happened to be the lightning rod it latched onto. It may not have been as theatrical, centered around a known, charismatic leader’s direction…but the maliciousness and negative feelings brewing underneath the surface was of an ominous, similar tone. Feral, and 100 percent driven by emotion, it spread like mass hysteria, until we didn’t know where it ended and where it began.
Not all of us partook. But none of us intervened for the same reasons cited by so many before us during their moments of conscience: fear of speaking out, fear of drawing attention to oneself, and the acceptance of the thoroughly dysfunctional atmosphere as normal. And truthfully it was normal. It became our normal. Dysfunction and the inversion of reason was what governed our world for eight and half weeks. In the grand scheme of things, it was all a mind game meant to break us down and prepare us for the unpreparable, to build us back up to what the military needed us to be: united.
And it worked.
Once Basic Military Training (BMT) was over, we were still us, but now had a new skin that we would have to put on in our new reality. We were all new versions of ourselves, unlocking sides of our personalities and resilience that were previously unrealized and dormant. Sides of us that the military needed to function. It took some time for my family to get used to it, and in certain ways the change alienated me from them. So, I ended up falling deeper into military life, putting my faith in its structure and function and the people in charge of me. I had no desire to look back, and why would I? Pre-BMT, I lived a sad, quiet existence spent bidding my time until I could leave my parent’s house. I numbed myself to the constant cacophony of my mentally ill-brother raging about one thing or another in his haze of psychosis and paranoia, while my parents tried in vain to help and manage him. Once free, I could focus on myself and what I wanted. Granted, it was in a controlled environment, but at least it was an environment I had chosen, and not one I was made to endure.
I was lucky. There were plenty before me and after that have done the same and can’t say that their faith in the military system was rewarded. Sexual assault, job sabotage, these were just some of the things that could have befallen me as a young Airman but didn’t, despite how vulnerable I truly was to it all. And trust me, I was vulnerable. Spending my teen years in a self-induced haze of book study, social isolation, and emotional numbing as survival meant I had entered adulthood naive in the romantic and social sense. The opposite sex’s interest intimidated and excited me, but I had no idea how to respond to it. Mixed messages were sent. I revealed too much and usually scared potential suitors away.
I was never victimized. I never had to go through the military system in place for survivors of assault or report someone to the Inspector General for workplace abuse. Instead, I caught the attention of someone from before I left for the Air Force. Someone who was part of my Air Force journey from the very beginning. I clung to him and he clung to me, despite the long distance between us. We fed off each other’s feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, becoming a toxic yin and yang that kept us both from leaving behind the past in favor of evolving into something more concrete and beautiful. Which in turn almost cost me my Air Force career less than a year in. All I could think about was seeing him. I thought I was happy, and at times he did make me happy. But his presence in my life colored everything that I did and experienced and planned for in the future. I couldn’t face the truth: that I was losing myself. I fell into the habit of downplaying how bad things were and rationalizing that it would be ten times worse if I was alone.
Certain members of Peoples Temple did that as well, be it when it came to the cause or when being with Jones himself…and for longer. We try so hard to tell ourselves that other people’s faults can never happen to us, and yet when it does, we claim it’s not the same. We make excuses for how it’s different, and how it’s not as bad. We’re the heroes in our own story, and heroes can’t make mistakes. For the longest time, that part of the Peoples Temple story – the inner circle with its romantic and political intrigue – elicited no sympathy from me. I saw the inner circle as Harley Quinns of the highest order, literally driven to madness by toxic love. There’s still some truth to this. But just as much complexity to it as well. After all, Harley Quinn didn’t start off as the Joker’s accomplice. And eventually even she broke free from his spell. It just so happened this story didn’t have that ending.
We can only speculate. I can’t speak for the members of the inner circle. All we have left of them are recordings and letters, people’s memories and our analysis of them to ascertain what was going through their minds as they either drowned in their adoration of Jones, or the compromises and radicalism that Jones had come to represent. I can speak for myself though, remembering what it meant to be another young, vulnerable, twenty-year-old entering the adult world for the first time, determined to leave her mark, and what I remember was that I was afraid. Afraid…and yet drawn to uncharted territory, of roads not taken. Afraid of letting go of the person I first fell in love with and what he represented, and the future we planned for ourselves. I believed he would be my only chance at love and that he was the only one who would ever understand me; the only person who had seen a side of myself no one else had been allowed to see. I was afraid of the silence that would follow if things between us ended, and not just of the loss of a romance, but the loss of an ideal. A mentor. A friend.
My naïveté didn’t end there, but thankfully, again, I was lucky. So much of what was going on beneath the surface in my work center I was simply ignorant to, and in a way that shielded me from the more venomous side of our squadron’s bureaucracy and politics. Work could be stressful and at times intolerable due to certain people. But the best people always shined through. We were in the trenches, so to speak, us younger airman – The E-4 Mafia – against the higherups, the non-commissioned officers that held our faiths in their hands, deep in a culture and experience only about one percent of the country got to have. That bond kept us afloat even in the worst of times, while the fear of the unknown, fear of no safety net – the civilian adult world – kept us from leaving the armed forces early.
That’s not to say that the Air Force was a cult. It certainly had cult-like attributes: you couldn’t just quit and not show up to work one day, and God help you if any dissenting opinion on the military or its leaders were to be made public while you were in uniform. But there was always a way out that we were free to pursue. If anything, they made getting out available at every turn: some airman simply waited until their enlistment was up and didn’t sign on for another 4 to 6 years. Others went to their command and asked to be released from their contracts, admitting to not being able to adapt (this option tended to be the messier, longer, more-paperwork-filled route). But it was an option. Even more easily so if you could get Mental Health to vouch for your failure to adapt. Others made stupid choices that got them kicked out, while some got too hurt or sick permanently to be able to deploy again.
Your membership in the USAF, your value, depended on whether you could still fulfill the mission without causing any problems, usually stemming from your personal life. Non-Commissioned officers didn’t want to hear about you not finishing your daily reports because your wife was cheating on you, or about how you didn’t want to go on a routine TDY because the area in question was “Sin City”, and the antithesis of everything you stood for religiously. The point is, in the military if you didn’t do your job, you were dropped. Simple as that.
The opposite seemed to be the case once you joined the Temple, which thrived on personal dysfunction. Your mistakes and faults – whether real or imagined – were regularly used against you to bind you to the cause. Yes, you had a certain amount of value to the cause if you provided money or a certain skill set, which is why seniors weren’t allowed to leave. They were turning over their social security and retirement checks to the Temple. It’s why none of the working adults could leave. They were the Temple’s work force, and in turn, that was why no child could ever leave. They were tethered to their parents working for the cause. But it was more personal than that. People weren’t just people in the Temple. They were among many thing’s numbers, a political army. A symbol that said socialism and equality was enduring and possible, that the dream that the Temple had been working toward was attainable. At least, that’s how it started. Jones’ drug abuse and worsening mental health degraded that message until the meaning morphed into the absolute aggrandization of Jones himself. To leave the Temple ranks diminished the importance Jones had built himself on.
Eventually my luck ran out. Unlike the Temple, the USAF was constantly prepping for its members to only be in for the short term. With almost mechanical efficiency, I was medically retired after nearly dying from Lupus, despite a successful deployment under my belt and no record of wrongdoing. It didn’t matter how much I had previously given and how far I had come, only that there was no more I could give. The Air Force had taken almost everything I had to give: my physical health, my time, and my sanity. Granted, there were at least two bright sides to all of this: my money was my own, growing, not exhausted. And I was alive. In everyone else’s eyes, I had won.
It didn’t feel like I’d won, though. I was stuck in this strange waking nightmare of being enveloped in a new identity that didn’t feel like mine, unrecognizable from the inside and out. Worse, I felt like I lost what had become so integral to my livelihood: my military family. What bound us together I could no longer be a part of: deployments, toxic leadership, promotions, none of it applied to me anymore. My world had ended, but the planet kept spinning.
I was regulated to the sidelines, made to watch my friends move on in their careers without me, like a high school dropout watching her classmates walk down the stage at graduation. I was alone, save for memories to keep me company and mock me: waking up on a Saturday morning to my dorm mate playing music in the bathroom suite we shared as she got ready for the day; cooking for my guy friends (my boys) in the dorm kitchen on the first floor, even if we had to sanitize all of the counters before it could be utilized; singing Disney songs on the drive to Boise on I-95, my in-tune soprano lost amidst the off-key, passionate baritones of my boys; waking up to a deep, mauve, Idaho sky and watching the first snowflakes of winter crystallize as I walked to work, my friends bemused and then accepting of my wonder at watching snow fall for the first time.
I became a ghost, unsure of where to move on to or what to do with my time still on Earth. For years I drifted from place to place, reeling from the loss of what I thought was the answer. My reasons for joining the military – hell, anyone’s reasons for joining a group or movement – weren’t unique. Decades pass, society evolves, but the same motivations push us toward our goals. And in some cases, those goals are of the lethal quality.
People like us, who enter a calling or service that asks for a certain amount of self-sacrifice, or in the military’s case, the ultimate sacrifice, are already dead in a way. We’re unsatisfied with ourselves, our current positions in life, but most of all we’re unable to see our value. We feel in a lot of ways invisible, unappreciated and insignificant to the people or system we crave affirmation from the most, and in turn we see our lives as meaningless, not worthy of being remembered. It’s what makes the call of the armed forces, of a political or spiritual movement, so alluring, whether you are a young 18-year-old fresh out of High School, bereft of self-actualization and confidence, or a 60-year-old grandmother, who has seen her value diminished by society throughout her life in the form of racism and classism and all the other ism’s that seem to thrive in this country. To be mourned becomes synonymous with having significance.
To enter such a service does nothing for that deep-seated insecurity. It only feeds it, by perpetuating the idea that your personal worth depends on what you can do for the mission, what your death can do for the cause, capping off only when you get out, either through the end of your enlistment or tragic circumstance…or in the Temple’s case, defection. If you’re lucky, you have a close-knit group of people to help you pick up the pieces after you’re out. People who remind you that they don’t care about the medals or promotions, or how your death can further the cause. Who remind you that there IS a “you” outside of that uniform and organization, and that you don’t need to die to have value as a person.
The Peoples Temple story is not one of alien disconnect, contrary to what the media tried to portray in the years following the massacre. Nor is it something to be hidden away, censured from collective memory and brushed aside as an embarrassing lapse in judgement and sanity. It’s a story of dreaming of more, of bringing that ideal to life and finding that human connection that eludes so many of us. It’s about searching for the answers and what it means to value yourself in your own right, how good intentions and love can be perverted when we stop seeing ourselves and others as people and more as symbols, when we start putting more importance on a person’s death than their life. And sadly, it’s a story of betrayal: in one’s principles. Loyalty. Love. Trust. And hope.
These people weren’t different from us. It’s not that hard to recognize that spark of hope in a photograph from the 1970’s and see that same spark when looking in the mirror today. I know I did, and I know others have as well, to their discomfort. And the truth is, that is why the general public’s kneejerk reaction is to reject and dehumanize them. That is why people would rather dismiss them as crazed, mindless followers who “drank the Kool-Aid.” People don’t want to picture themselves doing something so fundamentally aberrant to themselves and their fellow man, let alone their children, in the name of one insane individual. But that perception is a fallacy that has been perpetuated for far too long. These people didn’t die in Guyana because they were sheep. They were victims. Lied to and abused for years, degraded until their individual wills and what little self-worth they had was ground into the dirt. Above all, they were promised that paradise and their faith would be rewarded if only they stayed true to their cause and each other.
To admit we recognize ourselves in them is to admit that we could have done the same. To acknowledge their humanity is to acknowledge that we are just as vulnerable as they were. Maybe, if we are to take anything from Peoples Temple and Jonestown, it’s that we don’t give ourselves enough credit: that what we lack isn’t the desire to do good, but the ability to be good to ourselves. To not be able to afford ourselves that dignity isn’t unique, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the status quo. If anything, we need to fight to reverse it. We need to see the value in ourselves.
Because if we don’t, someone of the malevolent variety will.
(Cassandra Manuel may be reached at dearlybelovedxp@gmail.com.)