25 Years On....
Still drinking the Kool-Aid:
COOPER: You were away from Jonestown the day this tragedy happened. You were buying supplies for the camp. If you had been there, do you think you would have drunk the cyanide?KOHL: I really can't tell at this point. I do know that, if I had seen, really, my adoptive family of 913 people all dying around me, it would have been a very tough decision not to.
COOPER: Really? You think you might have actually done it?
KOHL: Well, looking back 25 years, it seems really like a faraway decision. So -- but I think it would be really difficult not to in that setting.
Wow, the power that some people have over others a quarter-century from the grave! This poor woman even still believes in the Mission:
KOHL: Well, the thing that I think is the most understated was that we really did have a community that, had Jim Jones been forced aside or had he left willingly and let the triumvirate set up, we really had a structure in place that would make a successful community living there with people of all different races and backgrounds, which really would have been a promised land or heaven on Earth.
I think, frankly, we are seeing the same sort of zombification in the anti-war left today. I get e-mails from protesters saying that Bush is just as bad as Hitler, US soldier are the moral eqiuvalent of Nazis, etc. Yet when it's pointed out that Kristallnacht was the smashing of Jewish homes, businesses, and citiznery, while President Bush welcomes Muslims (the Left's incorrectly presumed enemy of the US today -- it's actually the Wahabis) into the White House, the emailer will revert to rants and non-sequiturs.
Where's the old left that I was a part of, however befuddledly, as a teenager? The fun, the joie de vivre, the embracing of life and its possibilities? The leftists I meet in NY or in cyberspace today are the meanest, cruelest humans I know. Their invective and condecension, their hatred and their shallowness, their lack of interest in the world outside their heads and their vituperativeness towards those who question their received truths, defies civility or good graces.
I'm happily a libertarian just so I don't have to mix with these vulgarians at parties.
