Amish draft horses, Lancaster Junction Trail. June 2021
[from FB post: June 19, 2012]
Place: Hershey Medical Center, Starbucks
Time: Yesterday late afternoon
Waiting in line behind a bunch of Amish people wearing traditional clothes and super expensive sneakers.
They had frappacinos and paid with a card.
It really was a WTF moment......
[from FB post: June 20, 2012]
And just when I thought that I'd seen it all....
A van filled with "plain people" (since really I don't know if they were Amish or Mennonite) was emptying out a the main entrance at the same time a group of African Muslim ladies were entering in traditional clothing. I gotta get me an iPhone so I can start taking photos of this stuff!
The Arabic word for hypocrite is "munafik". It has much deeper cultural and religious tones in the Islamic world than in the West, but it also makes me think about the Amish in the USA and their lifestyle. Who are those people that claim to believe one thing, but, in fact, sometimes do the opposite?
When Mom was in the Hershey Medical Center for a hysterectomy (very late in life due to cancer caught early) I was in and out of the place frequently and was struck by the number of Amish people I saw there. I don't know why it should have felt so strange - the Med Center was one of the best options locally, thousands of Amish people lived nearby, and there was no reason an Amish person shouldn't seek treatment there like anyone else. For me, it was just the juxtaposition of the very plain, low-tech Amish folk against the backdrop of ultra-modern medical science.
The Amish were always a big topic among, we, the "non-plain" people of that part of Pennsylvania. It was amazing how much general ill-will was felt toward them in spite of their very peaceful desire to live separately from everyone else. By "ill-will" I mean that local people NEVER told positive stories about Amish people. The stories were always about their munafik behavior or about how those "oh so peace loving" people were really not so good as they appeared.
Like any religion and culture, the Amish are more on a spectrum than monolithically adhering to one set of fixed beliefs. There are the "Old Order Amish" and the "New Order Amish" (electric and non-electric). They range from rejecting nearly everything modern to accepting many modern things with their own twist. Everyone local's rub with the Amish is that their very obvious eschewing of the modern world is just fraught with exceptions. For outsiders who try to make sense of it. the Plain Folk are exasperatingly classified as eccentric people who live a very munafik lifestyle.
Roller skates are permitted by the Amish, so we non-Amish want to relegate their use to old style ones rather than the latest in-line blades. Amish people drink coffee, but we don't want them to patronize Starbucks - instead they should drink bitter Maxwell House brewed on a woodfired stove. Amish people use basic farm equipment with wheels, so we want to see them use machines from 200 years ago even if the latest technology is not that complex. Is the problem the Amish? or is the problem that they cut themselves off from us and we relentlessly need to find fault with them?
Why does their lifestyle bother local people so? After all, Amish people keep to themselves.
Is there a danger?
History has not been kind to minority communities who led separate lives in segregated communities (by choice or otherwise). My most recent experience was with the Yazidis of northern Iraq and Syria. When ISIS came and saw them as blasphemers, their Muslim neighbors of centuries just pointed those heretical butchers in the right direction, "The Yazidis? Those infidels! They live in that village over there". In similar circumstances, would people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania do the same? "You want those weird Amish people? They live on farms with no electrical lines leading to them. They will be easy to spot."
I know it sounds absurd - when would anyone be in a real cultural-religious war in Pennsylvania? I am sure the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq thought that too.
The Amish better start drinking their frappuccinos in secret.