My parents subscribed to both Time and Newsweek and in 1978, I remember the covers of both that December were of the bodies in the jungle. The fact that many of the people who drank the cyanide - as well as Jim Jones himself - were originally from Indiana, that stayed with me. I wanted to know why they did such a baffling, horrendous thing, why they would kill their children.

I think the folks who joined Jim Jones's church did so because they truly believed in his stated ideals of racial equality and social justice. That's why he was able to convince one thousand of them to immigrate to the jungle of Guyana. Although history has stigmatized Jonestown residents as the people who "drank the Kool-aid," I'd argue that they were noble idealists. Furthermore, they were murdered. They didn't willingly drink poison - they were forced to do so at gunpoint. They sought the ideal, only to have their leader horribly betray them.

I spent so much time at Escuela Caribe denying my true emotions and avoiding conflict that I became unsure of what my feelings really were. This is something that affects me to this day. I feel extremely uncomfortable during arguments, to the point of shutting down and not saying anything, like a turtle retracting into its shell. I can't stand conflict.

In California, Jim Jones even staged a shooting of himself. The lesson of this was two-fold. One, that he was a god - he could heal himself. He had these magic powers. A large segment of his congregation came from a Pentecostal tradition that believed in faith healing and already believed Jones had the power to cure others. And two, the "shooting" made him seem important. Civil rights leaders were being gunned down - MLK, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X - and he longed to be considered as heroic and important as they were.

My parents subscribed to both Time and Newsweek and in 1978, I remember the covers of both that December were of the bodies in the jungle. The fact that many of the people who drank the cyanide - as well as Jim Jones himself - were originally from Indiana, that stayed with me. I wanted to know why they did such a baffling, horrendous thing, why they would kill their children.

In my view, the problem with many conservative Christian parents is that they won't allow their children to have a different worldview from their own, and they don't forgive normal teenage experimentation, which they consider rebellion.

Jim Jones started out as a civil rights crusader in Indianapolis. As a young preacher in the mid-50s, he used members of his congregation to integrate lunch counters and all-white churches in rich neighborhoods; they'd just march in and sit down at the pews and see what happened. Often they were received with racist insults, and once with a bomb threat. But the fact that you had this charismatic, white man, aggressively promoting racial equality, was a huge draw for African Americans, many of whom felt the Civil Rights Movement had stalled by the late 60s.