I am a seeker of the truth. I always assume others to be also, but I am often wrong in that assumption. While my research on Peoples Temple is vast and has extended over many years since I was a teenager, I find increasingly that others have fallen hook, line and sinker for the media\u2019s longstanding story about what happened in Jonestown. As far as I\u2019m concerned, the assertions that Peoples Temple was a dangerous organization and not what it seemed to be, are up for debate. Any organization is bound to have as many\u00a0differing opinions about it as it has participating members. My mother and I were out to breakfast at a restaurant yesterday, and today neither one of us can agree on what we ate. I defy you to find any two people who agree on any situation they\u2019ve both seen.\u00a0Lies \u2013 outright and of omission \u2013 have taken hold and grown roots. My own frustration with people\u2019s belief of and misinformation about Jonestown as a complete issue must pale in comparison to the feelings that must fester in the hearts and minds of actual survivors. I can only imagine the frustrations when you are faced time and again with lies and innuendo of a situation you\u2019ve actually lived in and around, knowing that what you hear is plain wrong.<\/p>\n
But how does one fight a lie that has permeated and grown roots for almost 30 years?<\/p>\n
The unfortunate aspect of this is that the very same incident which gives the subject a public identity \u2013 the scenes of carnage in Jonestown \u2013\u00a0is an almost insurmountable hurdle in dispelling all the myths behind it. The proverbial \u201cCatch 22\u201d situation. Even knowing the bit that I know as result of my research causes frustration when trying to keep another\u2019s attention long enough to make my point. Seemingly a simple situation to surmount, however, it also reveals people\u2019s willingness to eat what they are fed.<\/p>\n
After purposely forging ties with some well known survivors whose email addresses were readily available on this website. I have been lucky in that I have perused and actually made friends of many who were actually in Jonestown. My original intent was merely to express my heartfelt condolences to the survivors as I knew in our society, how the media and our own government had treated them so shabbily. I wanted them to know that there were still some thinking and feeling folks out here.\u00a0I was humbled even further when I found open and quite receptive people ready and somewhat eager to share their truths with me. I have been lucky to have made some ongoing and very close relationships with Laura and Ron Kohl, Rebecca Moore and her husband, Fielding McGehee, Don Beck, Juanell Smart, and Tim Carter. Quite in opposition to the preconceived notions about those who were\/are involved with Peoples Temple, I have found them all to be individuals, all with their own personalities, woes and human frailties. Not once did I detect any hint of brainwashing or any other of the falsities they\u2019ve been endowed with by the media and the U.S. Government. I found them all to be very thought-provoking, sensitive and more responsive than even people in my biological family. Even though almost our cross country\u2019s distance separates me from most of them, their warmth, ability to give one a perspective on the world\u2019s realities and seemingly genuine care for a person\u2019s humanity have truly shortened the distance.<\/p>\n
Although I have been a \u201cvictim\u201d of the media and government smear campaign about the citizens of Jonestown, Guyana, I am no longer. And neither is anyone who takes the time and care to make connections with Jonestown\u2019s survivors. The community deserves better treatment in the media than what it has received, because its intention was founded on what the U.S. as a society is lacking: conviction, equality and justice. It is quite ironic that we can be drawn to the crimes of psychopaths like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and Ted Bundy, because we as a society understand crushing another person to smithereens, or that we will fall under the influence of non-reality reality shows like Survivor<\/i> (talk about irony) exploiting people\u2019s need for and willingness to do any\u00a0humiliating and dehumanizing\u00a0thing for a dollar bill, and yet we don\u2019t try to probe the human foibles that led a laudable human experiment to fail. So a group of people gives up the evils of this existence in search of a more harmonious way of being, and finds itself duped by a charismatic leader, and this is somehow an unbearable thought to our consciousness? I beg to differ. I will always beg to differ.<\/p>\n
(Susan M. White Hicks’ complete collection of writings for <\/em>the jonestown report may be found here<\/a>. She can be reached at rokkee4@yahoo.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am a seeker of the truth. I always assume others to be also, but I am often wrong in that assumption. While my research on Peoples Temple is vast and has extended over many years since I was a teenager, I find increasingly that others have fallen hook, line and sinker for the media\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31960,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-32013","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32013"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52036,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32013\/revisions\/52036"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}