Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Boston Globe, meanwhile, offered justification for how people ended up as suicide victims, spotlighting personal problems that presumably might have led one to join a cult. About 45-year-old Alan Bowers, the Globe wrote, "Friends said he had never recovered from the pain of his wife's leaving him, or from his brother's death." Just below, a headline about a local member of the cult read "Mass. native joined cult after sad childhood"; the article painted her life as a virtual trail of tears, beginning with her father leaving the household when she was four...
...fact, in a section of their website titled "Our Position Against Suicide," the cult anticipates the popular reactyion to a mass suicide. It makes clear that for them, "suicide" would be staying on Earth when the chance for salvation had come...
...course, the easiest way to dismiss the Heaven's Gate cult is to write them off as brainwashed lunatics. But given the anecdotal evidence, it seems that many members of Heaven's Gate were not simply weak and deluded souls...
...from a prominent Connecticut family who often, openly discussed his membership in the cult with his family a "wounded, foolish follower"? Or the professor's son who told his mother he could not see himself fitting in with traditional society, and felt at home with Heaven's Gate? Or the mother from Cincinatti, who spotted Applewhite's writings on the Internet and felt compelled to leave her three boys and newborn twin girls to join the group? For their sake, if not for all 39 of the dead, we should stifle a bit of our condescension and maintain the humility...
...followed the grim discoveries at Rancho Santa Fe, so-called mind control experts have speculated that the fault somehow lay in the tech world, that something about the Web explained Heaven's Gate and the isolation of its members from the cushioning norms of society. Not true. The cult had been around for 22 years, and had seen better days. Most of its members were Web novices at best. Yet in some ways, the Web was made for groups like this. For it is not the culture of the Internet, but its utility as a two-way means of communication...