Something About Jim Lindberg (from long ago)

Kool Aid

Ever wonder if Jonestown juice tasted good? They mixed the Kool Aid™ without sugar, forced themselves to drink the bitterness of Jimmy’s life.

The end of the world never came:

not for Jim Jones; not for Hal Lindsay; not for David Koresh; not for Heaven’s Gate; not for Jehovah’s Witnesses; not for Seventh Day Adventist’s; not for Pentecostals camped out on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; not for computer dependent society on year two thousand.

Not for anyone anywhere has this world ended upon setting a date. Not even for me, will this world crash and burn under my feet.

I inherited this stain from my father and he from his as well. My grandfather, who lived through the great depression, spent the rest of his days in paranoia of the crashes second coming.

Every night, for over twenty years, my father would wax poetically gloom and doom at the dinner table always about the second coming; the second coming of the crash! Whereby, on this glorious day, Wall Street stockbrokers would jump to their deaths; yes, they would jump to their deaths out skyscraper windows. As they fell, their finical dreams would flash in front of their eyes before they landed—splat. Each time he told that story, I swore I’d never be like him.

I am the same he. However, I am not seeking economic destruction in America Nor the deaths of a few rich men in New York City. My lament is that the end of this age of violence will not come soon enough to satisfy my theological desires. I am sane enough to know that I cannot simply wish it to be so.

November 18, 1978, Jim Jones at Jonestown, French Guyana, slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty. He wanted the end so badly; he tried to force God’s hand.

It didn’t work the rapture never came. However, Jimmy did stop the world’s turning for an instant, when the news broke on TV. The sight of all those bodies stuffed into Bags strewn across the grounds of his tent church was horrific—one that I’ll never forget.

The irony is that in all the massacres that followed this world keeps spinning at the same rapid pace.

Composed by William James on May 18, 2001, McMinnville, Oregon.