Hi, Jim.
My friend Dylan wrote a beautiful message here and it made me think about writing one too.
I’m not from the U.S., but I’ve thought about Peoples Temple and Jonestown from time to time over the years, horrified by the tragedy and by how things could ever have ended that way. Yet I hadn’t thought very much about you as a person until about a year ago.
I chose to think about you because there was something about you that caught my attention, even if I don’t remember now exactly what that was. Perhaps it was some form of empathy, or compassion. I felt a wish to comfort you, or to care about you, even though you died nine years before I was born.
When I talk about you in discussions, I describe you as a complex person, and I genuinely believe that you were. I’m not writing this as an attempt to excuse or support the atrocities or the deaths in Jonestown. It was a terrible tragedy. But it wasn’t the violence that first caught my attention when it came to you. It was the complexity that I saw in you.
My feelings about you have been complex and intense, and sometimes they have felt a little overwhelming. Yet at my core, I find you are a person for whom I feel a lot of tenderness. I do believe that you had genuinely good intentions when it came to fighting racism and working towards a more equal society.
If we had met, I’m not sure you would have liked me very much. I’ve never been very good at fitting into congregations or ideological groups. Still, I think it would have been fascinating to meet you in person, to hear you speak, and to hear about your ideas and opinions directly from you.
I can understand people who wish that you could atone for what you did. Personally, I don’t know whether I wish that. I’m agnostic, and don’t know whether there is an afterlife. But if there is one, I hope that you at least have come to see the sadness and suffering that you caused.
Even though I don’t support the way things ended, my heart aches for you, and I hope you have found peace.
Hannah Bard
(Hanna Namrata Bard is a Swedish language teacher and writer based in Sweden, with a deep interest in the complexity of human nature and human relationships. She can be reached at hannabard63@gmail.com.)