The phrase "drinking the kool aid" insults the memories of innocent victims who were murdered.
People can choose to be offended if they like. No offense is intended.
Maimonides would indeed not join in the ridiculing of innocent murder victims.
The phrase doesn't actually refer to murder any more assuming it ever did. It disparagingly refers to the indoctrination people like those at Jonestown, which occurred before they chose to go there and is why they went there. It doesn't refer to the children, who literally drank the poison as well as their indoctrinated parents. From Wiki:
"
Drinking the Kool-Aid" is most strongly believing and accepting in a deadly, deranged, or foolish ideology or concept based only upon the overpowering coaxing of another"
Although this is a religious example, I hear the phrase most often in connection with American conservative political indoctrination. The perpetrators who believed Trump's Big Lie drank the Kool-Aid. Those who say that it wasn't an insurrection drank the Kool-Aid. Those who believe that prosecuting Trumps crimes is politically motivated drank the Kool-Aid.
That link was a list of links. This is from the first one:
(This is an edited version of the remarks Kathy Tropp Barbour made at the Jonestown Memorial at the service for survivors and families on November 18, 2011. The remarks were addressed in the presence of the 30 people gathered on the hillside and the 409 people buried at her feet, but also to the 914 members of Peoples Temple who died 33 years earlier.)
To the family we gather to honor, you will live in our hearts forever. Some survivors and former members of Peoples Temple would like to stop people from using the phrase, “drinking the Kool-Aid” out of respect for you. I think this is misguided and, even if it were possible, might not have the intended result. I say this for three reasons:
- • It is a useful phrase. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a verb; the noun is “Kool-Aid drinker.” These terms express a complex concept, that of loyalty to a leader or a cause to the extreme of one’s own demise. They are universally recognized, universally understood, to convey that, and usually it is appropriate.
- Although the offense of hearing our loved ones reduced to an aspersion is real, most of the time these words are used, it is to describe someone else. They are not talking about us. I would try not to take it personally.
- Third and most importantly, there is no untruth in it. It happened, we have all had to deal with the reality of it and the pain of the result, and come to terms with it.
The second link contained this:
"
After talking to a couple of people about it, though, I realized that I had assumed everyone knows where the expression “Drink the Kool-Aid” came from. Many of the people attending the forum were younger than I am and may have never even heard of Jonestown, much less have made the association with the expression."
So no to the contention that the phrase is ridiculing the deaths at Jonestown. But as I said, those who choose to take offense at the phrase are free to do so. I don't intend to give up using the phrase, and it would be exceedingly unlikely that I have in the past or would in the future offend anybody. It's too useful a phrase to give up because somebody somewhere might be offended almost a half century after the fact.
www.bbc.com
