Social Kapital Joel Postman

I hate buzz words and cliches passionately, but one of the worst is “drinking the Kool-Aid.” This week marks the 30th anniversary of the event that spawned that idiotic expression, the Jonestown Massacre, in which as many as 900 followers of the cult leader Jim Jones died after being forced to consume Kool-Aid laced with poison.

Tim Reiterman, a journalist who flew to Jonestown, Guyana at the time, and saw Congressman Leo Ryan and several journalists shot dead by Jones’s gunmen, recently said during an interview on NPR that the Kool-Aid cliche was “thoughtless” and “disrespectful.”

The events were tragic enough. Let’s not commemorate them with a joke.