 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
The AmishOctober 10, 2006 From the various news digests I download each morning and sometimes skim, sometimes delete unread, I knew several students had been killed by a gunman at an Amish school the Monday before yesterday, but that's all I knew. I didn't follow up. Reading the news is like watching half a dozen car crashes at once, and they keep happening over and over. If I need to know something, I figure, it'll catch up with me. This one did. Over the weekend someone e-mailed me a story: "What the Amish Are Teaching America," by Sally Kohn. It seems the night of the shooting, with three little girls dead and eight in critical condition (one of whom has died since), families and neighbors gathered to grieve and to talk with mental health counselors. Writes Kohn: According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that OK? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts' family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don't automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption. Meanwhile, the United States culture from which the Amish are isolated is moving in the other direction -- increasingly exacting revenge for crimes and punishing violence with more violence. . . . Why is this? Children aren't generally encouraged to beat the crap out of anyone who hits them, and most of us learn early on that beating the crap out of someone who beat the crap out of us just makes them want to beat the crap out of us again, and maybe this time they'll bring along some friends. It's not hard to see where this leads: to rumbles and gang wars and U.S. foreign policy. After 9/11 it wasn't possible to beat the crap out of the guys who took out the twin towers so we decided to beat the crap out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Don't we feel better now? Isn't the world a better, more peaceful, less terrified place? Confronted with inexplicable and irrevocable loss, the Amish didn't immediately jettison their faith and their principles; they acted in accordance with them. In their grief, they remembered that they weren't the only ones grieving. This was not the case, as I recall, in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings. The shooters in that case -- as in this one, as also on 9/11 -- were dead. Plenty of the good people in Colorado and elsewhere blamed the parents. The Amish offered food and condolences to the family. This morning, "What the Amish Are Teaching America" was posted on AlterNet. Readers have been grappling with both the story and the incident; their comments veer from wonder to skepticism, sometimes in the same paragraph, and considerable uneasiness with the fact that the Amish are among the most fundamentalist of Christians. Not like those fundamentalists, though; not like the fundamentalists who have been driving the Republican Party for the last three decades or so. A few seem to fear that admiring the Amish of Nickel Mines and striving to emulate their compassion necessarily involves uncritical acceptance of all their beliefs. This all-or-nothing thinking is so common these days. Most of us know how complex and contradictory our own communities are. Why is it so hard to extend the benefit of the doubt to the communities we have no personal experience of? I'm not about to turn Amish. True, I could probably be pretty happy in a horse-and-buggy world, but not one with such limited options for women and such a strong heterosexual imperative. But I can't help but be inspired by any community that could respond like this, and wonder what they might have that we on the outside could learn from. The Amish are practical; so can we be. We can take what we like and leave the rest. If it turns out that we've taken the wrong part or misunderstood how to use it or left something important behind, we can make adjustments. If we really screw up, we can start again from scratch. So what are the Amish teaching America? Or, to be less grandiose and a little more humble, what are they teaching me? What enables a community to respond to such devastating, irreparable loss with compassion, not with hatred; with offers of food and condolences, not vows of retribution? My first thought was that the Amish don't continually expose themselves to violent images, violent stories, violent news. They may not realize that on the outside, the desire for retribution is widely accepted as normal. Sometimes it stops with the perpetrator and waits till conviction; sometimes it devastates whole countries on the flimsiest of evidence. My second was that the Amish practice their beliefs, day after day, year after year, generation after generation. In the U.S. of A., this is widely considered impractical. To be practical you're supposed to acknowledge your beliefs in certain circumstances and on certain days, but you certainly aren't expected to take them seriously. Heavens, no: Someone would surely take advantage of you, or make fun of you -- and how would you make a living? But practical and practice come from the same root. This born-again horsegirl and fledgling guitar player can testify: practice may not make perfect, but it does change one's perception of what's practical and what isn't. What if more people practiced, say, the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, or those in the U.S. Bill of Rights? My third was that the Amish practice their beliefs in community, not in isolation. Isolation makes most things harder, and it doesn't offer much opportunity to practice the skills that sustain community. Isolation magnifies dangers and makes it hard to verify perceptions; isolation tends to explode or implode, and sometimes to do both at once. But like it or not, we're all part of at least one community, and most if not all of us are part of several. We're all part of humankind, which as communities go is so huge and diverse that it's tempting to take refuge in abstraction: thinking about the interests of humankind is impractical. But the Amish of Nickel Mines, those eminently practical -- some might say "insular" -- people, seem to have done it. Responding to great and totally unexpected loss, they reached out in compassion to their fellow humans and in so doing they acted in the interests of humankind.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||