Last Thoughts on "A Thousand Lives"

I almost didn't make it through this book, deciding that maybe it was too dark and truthful to read.  Much of that trepidation was brought to me after my first reading session, having had a nightmare related to the Jonestown event afterwards.  Nevertheless, I proceeded forward with reading A Thousand Lives, and the experience got easier.  So much so that in the middle of the book my sadness slipped away in place of an absolute, running inquisitiveness for how this ugly event unfolded.  And Scheeres didn’t seem to hold back--according to my intelligence on the subject.  She revealed a mountain of startling information/back story on the Jonestown event that had me scratching my head and sparkly-eyed at the same time.  It’s also interesting that the more I read it, the more I saw parallels between Jim Jones’s ill-intended actions surrounding the Jonestown community, and Mao’s actions over the larger-scaled China.  Toss in a few shared terms like “communism” and “socialism” and I was sold by the connection my feelers kept picking up--having experienced reading Jung Chang’s Mao: The Unknown Story a month previous.

My current dilemma is that I don’t know exactly how to tackle this surfacing of thought diligently.  Or without branching into another web of topics concerning the two.  What I’m pondering sounds both sensitive and insensitive.  So much so that I just want to disregard the entire subject.  Still, it’s clear to me that Jones and Mao used politics and lies to reign on their followers.  They practiced some intense chicanery.  They purged their many enemies and rivals without too much hesitation.  They used the power of hunger and defeatism.  And they repeatedly pounded their maniacal-based mantas to subjugate their defenseless crowds.  In the end many wearily walked into their deaths, after living with the broken hope for change promised by their leaders.  And both leaders' imploded on themselves in the end.

This is me keeping much of my troubling thoughts simple.

Nevertheless, through my reading of A Thousand Lives, I kept asking myself what everyone else may have asked themselves: “What would I do in this situation?”  Then I would ask myself do I know of anyone in my life that would be susceptible to something like Peoples Temple's (Jones’s organization) religious doctrines?  Or not so religious... as apparently seen.  

Would I have fought or spoken up come Jones’s final speech, much like Christine Miller did?  Nonetheless, a speech where Jones pushed and encouraged the sacrificing of the Jonestown community behind his contemptible lie that a war was about to storm the township after the murder of Congressman Ryan by his own men?  What ways would I have ran if I could run, just as some survivors did?  Would I have managed like the brave Leslie Wilson and her child, along with a handful of others who escaped into the jungle the morning Congressman Ryan stepped into Jonestown?  Would I have spoken up to leave with Ryan, just as Tommy Bogue and his father did?  Would I have been slick and brave like Stanley Clayton, who managed to slip pass the armed guards surrounding the perimeter for defects?  Or would I have been like the elderly African-American woman named Hyacinth Thrash, who followed her sister to Jonestown?  Hyacinth had a body so worn that she stopped attending the pavilion meetings in Jonestown (partly because she disagreed with Jones's message).  Her staying in her cottage this one night saved her life.  She hid underneath her bunk when the last of Jones’s men went about shooting other individuals who did not report to the pavilion to drink the poison.  While I couldn't recall her name, Hyacinth’s story as a survivor was one that I could remember after watching a documentary on the event years ago.  There was a “she is the woman they were talking about” moment as I read her piece on surviving.  

Nevertheless, the biggest question I kept asking myself was would I have ran if I saw my family die before me?

Even as I write this I get a little emotional at the thought.

Therefore, I will close this out by not only declaring that this book was an eye-opener, but that it also reminded me of how good it feels to be grateful to have those that I love still in my life.  And if I should take one thing from this book to keep me going, it would most certainly be the courageous story of the few Jonestown survivors.

What would you have done?  Hard to really answer, right?