I was 5 years old when the Jonestown Tragedy took place. Over 900 people committed the largest mass suicide in the history of the United States.

It has only been in the last year or so that I've revisited the tragedy and began to process the tremendous loss people have experienced. Some lost their entire family. Imagine if your whole family just left and you never saw them again.

As a child, I saw Guyana Tragedy: Story of Jim Jones, a narrative film made in the 70s about Jim Jones. It was my first exposure to Jonestown. And then I watched again as an adult a couple of years ago. I rented it from the library on VHS.

And then, last year with the release of Stanley Nelson's documentary on Netflix, I finally got a whole 'nother perspective on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.

And yet today I struggle with all the ramifications of this tragedy and the curiousity of whether anything like that could happen again.

In the documentary, the white survivors of the Temple recount the community being set up like a "Black Church." The majority of the folks who perished were in fact Black by all accounts I've seen.

And one woman's account in the Jonestown Documentary says "No one decided to join a cult. Nobody joins something they think will hurt them."

Yet, Jim Jones was in leadership and ran a dictatorship. This is not far from the way most ministries are ran today in different religions and churches. Called by God, most religous folks rely on the judgement of their pastor, minister, or priest.

I often question, what was so different about the Temple that caused people to leave it all behind.

I get becoming detached to wordly things. I get service to others. But the sexual misconduct, the violence, the deceit...all spelled something that was not pure or holy.

My heart saddens each time I think of this tragedy.

An act of "revolutionary suicide" is what he called it. Surely he did not have the right to take so many lives no matter what lens you use to make sense of it all.

And yet his same revolutionary spirit was instrumental in desegregating several different governmental and private institutions. In 1961, Jones helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital and became the executive director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission.

Like most conspiracy theories...we will never know if in fact the many theories of CIA involvment and experimentation are true.