Thirty-Nine People Said Yes To The Wrong Thing

In March 1997 police came to a Rancho Santa Fe, California, mansion and found the corpses of thirty-nine people who had said yes to the wrong thing. They were members of the Heaven's Gate cult, impressionable people who had left homes, friends, and families all across America to follow cult leader Marshall Applewhite. The police found their bodies clothed in black and shrouded in purple. They had committed mass suicide, believing that their souls would leave their bodies and join up with a spaceship that they hoped was trailing behind a comet passing near earth. In the aftermath of the suicides, journalists talked with individuals who had at one time been proselytized by the cult and had seriously considered joining. Writers Jeff Zeleny and Susan Kuczka reported in the Chicago Tribune that a young man named Donald had heard about the cult while he was at the University of Wisconsin. His roommate became a believer. Donald put the cult out of his mind until a few months later when he received a phone call from a representative of Heaven's Gate who offered to send him a videotape entitled "Beyond Human--The Last Call."

"At that time in my life I decided I needed something to grasp on to," he said. Donald responded to the offer and watched the videotape. A few weeks later the cult representative phoned again and offered to send Donald a bus ticket to join the group. Donald thought about it, but eventually he declined, he said, because his girlfriend got upset about it. When the suicides later became public, Donald and his family shuddered with relief.

Just as it is vital to say yes to what is right, it is equally important to say a firm no to what is wrong. The word no can save you.