Can someone explain the whole kool-aid thing to me?

[cags]

I've never heard it before until I came here.

[CottonBear]

1. Jim Jones. Cult. Guyana. 70's.

This dude's followers drank Kool-aid with poison and all died in the Guyanese jungle.

edit: So to explain; drink the Kool-aid means to blindly follow and believe your leader, even if the consequences are severe (like death) and against your true best interests.

[cags]

5. Thanks

[Kinkistyle]

10. You should see the photos

Run a search on Jonestown and check out some of the photos. Absolutely BONECHILLING.

[CottonBear]

14. You're welcome.

on edit, I'm not quite sure of the correct date. May have been 1980.

edit: November 18, 1978

[LearnedHand]

17. I remembered it being right around Thanksgiving

Thanks for posting that date.

[Warpy]

11. It means you'll swallow any poison your leaders hand you

even if it kills you, even if you see it killing people all around you. It's a story of cult of personality and blind faith and a religious fervor misplaced to the point of being dangerous to you and everyone around you.

Look at the swill they swallow, from Rush to Pox to Savage to Hannity to Coulter. It's all toxic, damaging to the spirit, adn leads them into a state of total delusion. They continue to lap it up.

It's just like the poisoned Kool Aid Jim Jones fed his hundreds of followers and their children. They drank it willingly and they died.

[No Exit]

19. Quite right! And before that it was Joe and Magda Goebbels

giving poison to their 6 children because they knew they would soon be captured.

The parallels between Guyana, and the Goebbels' actions, and the mindless followers of the current adminstration are positively glaring.

[asthmaticeog]

2. "Drink the Kool Aid" means

to make a concious or unconcious decision to blindly follow a leader or a zeitgeist. It's from the Jonestown, Guyana massacre, where about 900 people willingly suicided by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid at the command of their cult leader.

[Bridget Burke]

13. Quite a few of them refused to drink the Koolaid.

So they were shot to death. Many of his followers were poor & non-white, so the media didn't investigate all that much. Even if they had wanted to leave before the end, how could they? It wasn't just matter of calling up Mumsy for a ticket home.

But the event is the source of the saying.

[ceile]

3. In the 70s

The cult that drank the kool-aid that was poisoned. Jonestown?

[LearnedHand]

4. Oh, you must be very young!

It's a reference to the 1970s incident when the cult leader Jim Jones incited his followers to drink poisoned KoolAid to commit suicide. IIRC, around 900 people followed suit, even forcing their children to drink the KoolAid! It happened in Guyana, S.A., where they had been living communally. It was a HORRIBLE, horrible tragedy.

On edit: My bad. It wasn't 4,000 people, but a little over 900 people who died.

[cags]

6. 1974

[LearnedHand]

15. You might have been 4 or 5, then...

...when this happened. I think it was 1978.

[King Coal]

7. It is a reference to Jim Jones' Cult.

They all killed themselves by drinking Flavor-Aid mixed with poison. Flavor-Aid was a cheaper brand than Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid was reported as being the drink the poison was added to, but it was actually Flavor-Aid.

[JimmyJazz]

8. It referes to a tragedy in Jonestown in 1980 - I posted

a link. It's a reference to being a sheep led to slaughter basically - believing what others tell you without question.

http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~reli291/Jonestown/Jonestown.html

[MadHound]

9. It refers to the poisonous Kool-Aid

That Jim Jones used to kill almost all of his followers. When the law was closing in and things were getting tight, Jim Jones mixed up a bunch of poisonous Kool Aid, and gave it out to his followers. A few didn't know that it was poisonous, but most did, and drank anyway, following their "saviour" even unto death. Thus happened the Jonestown massacre.

That is what it means to "drink the Kool Aid". You know you're leader is going to kill you with his policies, yet you blithely follow him anyway, even into death.

[cags]

12. I knew about that but I wasn't putting the two together, thanks

[LearnedHand]

16. Amazing, isn't it, how allusions sometimes...

...are VERY relevant to a specific time! It also shows how many of us here at DU are clustered in age!

[BiggJawn]

18. this is something frightening I stumbled across....

I was looking for a graphic of the Kool-Aid pitcher and found THIS...

[JHB]

20. That's a poke at dry fundys...

...who go to great lengths to explain why they think that Jesus didn't drink or create any (alcohol-containing) wine, that the biblical references to "wine" refer to something else (and by some mental backflip they still think of it as a "literal interpretation")

[BiggJawn]

22. Yeah, the "New Wine" argument...

"New Wine" being unfermented grape juice.
Now, let us meditate for about 15 seconds on what happens to a liquid just FULL of sugar in a warm climate where NSF rules weren't followed. Don't need Alton Brown to figure THAT one out, do we?

How long before that "New Wine" has enough potency to knock you on your ass?

What struck me about the 'toon was the pastor-church-Kool-Aid connexion...

[dutchdoctor]

21. Thanks for asking!

I was wondering about that!
The only thing I could come up with was "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", but i couldn't see what that had to do with anything..