Jeff Jarvis reminds us that today is the 25th anniversary of one of the bizarre preventable tragedies of my lifetime:

Twenty-five years ago today, more than 900 people were led to their deaths by an insane preacher named Jim Jones, who also ordered an attack that killed a congressman and a friend of mine, a photographer on the San Francisco Examiner named Greg Robinson. I was the Sunday news editor of the paper then; I edited the stories by reporter Tim Reiterman that led to that fact-finding trip to Guyana and the senseless tragedy that followed.

Jonestown has become the subject of Kool-Aid (though it was an off-brand) jokes and that’s understandable. But on this day, leave the jokes behind and remember the horror of that day: Hundreds of innocent, decent people, even children, lured into a sick cult where they were induced to leave everything behind to follow their leader’s paranoia even into death.

A quarter century later, that kind of fanaticism still boggles the mind.