Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple Page #4

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just went up around the room.

And Im sitting there petrified

because Im like,

Is this what its leading to,

that Im supposed to get to?

And Im thinking, hmmm.

But I played it off like,

Okay, Im being cool.

Okay, if thats where they at,

thats not where Im at.

Because Im thinking, My wife...

Im happy with my wife.

With this sleep Im not getting,

Im not getting enough anyway.

One of the powerful things that

Jim used, to keep us to not think,

was that we were never really allowed

to speak with one another.

Id look around and Id say,

Am I the only one that feels this way?

I learned, eventually,

not to say anything to anyone.

We had a lady

who visited us a week ago here

and was speaking to one at the door,

and she was a member of a prominent church,

a pastors wife,

and she said, I think that the poor

should be made to control

how many children they bring

into the earth. You remember?

Some leading scientists say,

We have to have euthanasia.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

Whos going to decide who

and when a persons going to die?

We must never allow that because

this is the kind of thing that ushers in

the terror of a Hitlers Germany.

We must not allow these kind of things

to enter our consciousness.

My father used to tell me

that peoples lives,

sixty percent of peoples lives,

were made on emotional decisions.

Make your decisions,

sixty percent of your decisions,

based on logic, fact and reason,

and allow emotion

to be the secondary motivator.

And... we were Star Trek fans.

He and I were Star Trek fans,

and he used to always say,

Just vulcanize yourself.

Just vulcanize yourself.

We were celebrating New Years Eve.

There were about

a hundred and twenty people.

Jim started talking

about our cause and he said,

This punch is going to be

passed out to everybody here.

We all drank our punch

and then he said,

You just drank poison.

And we will all die, right here

in the church, together as one.

The women were just screaming,

Oh no, my baby, my baby,

and others just sat there.

And all of a sudden, Jim says,

That wasnt poison you drank.

Jim said that

this was a test of loyalty.

He just wanted to see if we were

truly committed to our cause,

and that was

how we would show it.

Well it wasnt about our loyalty,

because we were

demonstrating loyalty all the time.

Coming there, being there

in the meetings, sitting, listening,

you know, supporting, working.

And I thought it had

a lot more to do with Jims sense of

rehearsal.

Did he feel like he was potent

and... and omnipotent enough

to really get people

to kill themselves when he said so?

And that frightened

the hell out of me.

Jim Jones, I think,

realized that

ultimately Ukiah

was not the sort of climate

where Peoples Temple would thrive.

He wasnt going to be gaining

large numbers of members.

He couldnt declare himself to be

a socialist god openly,

certainly in a city like Ukiah.

In San Francisco, Jones walked in

on a sort of a wild kind of party,

where there was a lot of new faces

and new sources of power.

And there was a sort of feeling

that smaller groups,

neighborhood groups, activist groups

had a bigger chance.

I think the early sixties

had been a time of great optimism;

there was a belief that

we could change the world

through social movements.

With various assassinations, Malcolm X,

Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King,

Robert Kennedy, there was definitely

a feeling of hopelessness.

The message of Peoples Temple was,

No, the dream is alive.

If you had a demonstration

in San Francisco

and you wanted

people to show up,

Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple,

could be there in twenty minutes,

with hundreds of people.

And we would be enthusiastic.

There was an attitude of,

"We can change the world."

And thats what we wanted to do.

These people would be on time,

theyd be polite and nice.

They were a span of ages,

a span of races.

They were tailor-made

for a political rally.

To a politician, it was like

a birthday cake times twelve.

You have managed to make

the many persons associated

with Peoples Temple part of a family.

If you are in need of healthcare,

you get healthcare.

If youre in need of legal assistance

of some sort, you get that.

If youre in need of

transportation, you get that.

And thats the kind of religious thing

that I am excited about,

and have some respect for.

When vice presidential candidate,

Walter Mondale, came to San Francisco,

Jim Jones was part of the entourage

that boarded his private jet.

When Rosalyn Carter

came to San Francisco,

she gave Jim Jones

a private audience.

Jim Jones had political power

that few people,

let alone preachers,

could have imagined.

Jim Jones represented

the Peoples Temple

as a progressive movement

that was threatened.

That there were outside forces who

didnt want us to do what we were doing.

And it was the government.

The government was infiltrating

and wiretapping

and trying to kill people

or assassinate people.

Thats what was happening.

He was always paranoid that

someone was going to get in

and try to kill him,

that they had two people

that had dedicated their lives,

that they were going to jump

in front of Jones and take the bullet,

kind of like the secret service

so to speak.

Jim started changing a lot

in the seventies.

He was taking drugs.

I think he said

it was his kidneys at the time.

And he was getting

more and more paranoid.

Incredibly paranoid.

There was always threats.

Always, always, always,

always threats. They were there.

They were just about

to try to destroy us

if we werent always viligant

about our movement.

There was a fire

in the San Francisco Temple.

The Temple was burned down

and had to be rebuilt.

The fire proved

they are out to get us.

They so dont want us to do

what were doing;

theyve burned down the Temple.

Theyll do anything to keep us

from doing what were doing.

So we have to be even stronger.

What about the fact that

the Ku Klux Klan

has increased one hundred times

in its membership?

Where? Not Mississippi,

Im talking about New York State.

Its the churchs duty to have

a place of protection for its people.

December of 75, ninety of us

went by plane, into Guyana,

and saw where we were

building the community there.

See, theyve made

progress on the road

and leveled it,

clear in to five miles.

And youre seeing in the distance,

housing complexes, that are being built.

What I saw that creation

as being was building a city

where we could move and raise

our children, outside of the oppression

and the racism of

the United States of America.

When I first went into Jonestown,

it was just a footpath in the rainforest.

We had Indians

in front of us with machetes,

and we had Indians

behind us with machetes.

Three-hundred miles into the jungle,

we literally built a city

in the middle of the jungle,

in the middle of nowhere.

Hello family. Its been a... its

such a joy and great pleasure being here,

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