Oct. 2. I found out that in an Amish community somewhere in Pen. couple hours previous- there was another school shooting.
At that time I’m at Blimpies catching a salad and this is on TV. Immediately I am thinking how poignant it is that even the Amish with the pains they are taking- cannot escape from the sewage issuing through the long gutters of this country.
The news has some expert discussing the profile of the dude who committed the crime. As often is the case with news- I am catching it in the middle- not knowing what I might have missed.
Hearing this expert - you’d think the news was a week old and they knew everything about the perp that could be learned. He makes a bunch of inditements about the Amish society while deftly throwing in some Alkaida comparisons. He says that what happens is people in communities like that cry out for some way to gain control of their own life. Alkeida recruits from within situations just like that where young men are lacking a sense of identity and feeling hopeless about life. Then he says. “and then ironically enough- a community like that lacks the kind of security a modern public school would have.”
The reporter asks what kind of gun might have been used. He goes in to an expert explanation of how the Amish might use a shotgun or a long range riffle for hunting and that one of these was likely the weapon.
Then I’m thinking, “Jeez - how much do they know about this guy” when the reporter asks “do you think there is any chance the assailant was not Amish?”.
Jeez - they know nothing about the dude- naturally because it only happened a couple hours prior as they stated. Now I’m thinking, what kind of an expert is this fascist guy who has gone and condemned an entire culture on anecdotes, his imagination, and on an incident which to any idiot seems more the creature of his our society than of the pacifistic and community centric Amish.
I glance at the corner of the screen. Low- and behold- it’s Fox and though I don’t have basically never had cable and watch very little TV ever what I was seeing tended to confirm what I hear about Fox’s journalistic standards. Unbelievable.
An hour later I read (at the fox website) not surprisingly- that the dude who did it was a 32 year-old truck driver. I was unable to find anything indicating the guy had ever been a member of the Amish community or a student at that school- I’m thinking maybe he wasn’t.
- turns out the guy indeed was NOT Amish. Figures. Heres some conjecture to add to what the expert offered. Perhaps this expert hates the Amish because 1. Amish are un-likely to vote for Bush, and 2. they generally do not consume fossil fuels rendering the Amish forthwith un-American x 2.
Among the insights I came away with all-told, was a renewed sense of gratefulness that I don’t have cable, and a heightened sense of appreciation for what the Amish have done. The Amish of those communities would be spared by their abstinence - the like of the news as rendered by the likes of Fox. Altogether, it seems that as odd as my predilections seem to others, I am more and more, satisfied consuming less and less each day of what society has to offer in an effort to build a different community from the uncarved block of my original household. Now I am not recommending one way or another concerning the Amish way of life. I am neither Amish nor Christian, but I smile on what they are doing, and feel aligned with and inspired by the sober and abstinent focus on community life.