''It is entirely fitting that on Memorial Day we are here on account of the hundreds of people who are not casualties of war, but casualties of society. For, in the final analysis, we have to bear collective responsibility for those individuals who could not find a place to go with their burdens, who came to that place of total helplessness, total despondency, where they took their own lives here on this beautiful bridge, this Golden Gate bridge, a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius but social failure.
Suicide is a symptom of an uncaring society. The suicide is a victim of conditions which we cannot tolerate, and, I guess that was a Freudian slip because I meant to say which he cannot tolerate, which overwhelm him for which there is no recourse. In his mind, the person who takes his life is a reflection on all of us. Many of the over 600 who have taken their lives here was very young. Indeed, some were teen-agers-people who had great abilities, talents, even genius, whose lives were barely begun, yet for various reasons they found themselves with no recourse, no way out of personal problems, aggravated by the terrible alienation and loneliness of a society that often seems to have no time, no desire to reach out to people who need help.
We are here today to do a very small thing to prevent people from taking their lives. But beyond stopgap measures, we must as a society arrive to find a way to break out of our isolation from one another. We are too caught up in the future pursuits of wealth and selfish pleasures. We don’t recognize and identify with and care for our fellow citizens sufficiently. Today, our society is caught in the grip of superficial values-glamour, glitter, materialism, a pathological emphasis on youth, a neglect of the elderly, the handicapped. Families are being broken up under the impact of a frenzied desire for success. Violence is glorified and paraded in front of children every day on the media. Basic human values, basic decency, kindness, cooperation are less and less evident. Economic pressures and psychological pressures mount.
More and more individuals feel unhappiness-and helplessness-in their acquisitiveness for pleasure and accumulation in this selfish society. They turn to artificial stimulants, they lose touch with themselves. Their problems, their insecurities mount, and become despondency. The suicides of society cause us to reflect on the terrible trend. I’m going to close that, I’m going to close it. I was thinking something of a more personal note might have had meaning. This past few days, we as a congregation of several thousand have undergone a considerable amount of pressure. It seems that there are those elements in society, very wrongfully, who want to use us as an embarrassment to this administration, and so I can greatly empathize. And there seems to be one magazine in particular pursuing that goal, even though on different times I have disagreed with with the mayor. And so this week my son said to me, “For the first time, Dad, I felt like -committing suicide.” He said, “I want to tell you what was on my mind. Maybe it might cause people to care if I jumped off the bridge while you were speaking.” We worked our way through that, but I think that perhaps we should all identify closely with that kind of personal experience, because at one time or other we have all felt the alienation and despair.
I think the despair got to me yesterday. If it hadn’t been for an academy award winning actress joining our church, not hearing me speak but feeling the warmth between all races, and all people, just that warmth touched her and caused her to say she wanted to unite, I think I would have been in a suicidal mood myself today for the perhaps the first time in my life, so I have a particular personal empathy for what we are doing here today. Thank you. ” – Jim Jones
