The Amish Are Different in a Different Way

A recent report that the Amish are heeding the "Go West, young man" advice of Horace Greeley several decades after the fact brought up the images of what people think the Amish are, and what they really are. Yes, they are very religious and yes, there are many elements of the nineteenth century in their daily life. But they are not quite the simple people living simple lives at least not in Southern Indiana.

The Amish moved into adjoining areas of Jefferson, Switzerland and Ripley Counties in the 1980s, after I had left the state. And they arrived in an area in which many residents had abandoned farming. They certainly kept much land in productive use and improved many farm houses and barns.

But one distant relative discussed what happened with the first Amish family that arrived, settling near her farm. Her husband was scheduled to be gone for the evening and she had set off for town--and their likely absence must have been known--because when she realized she needed to return for something she had forgotten, she saw a light in the barn. Investigating she found some Amish men with a buggy jacked up welding an axle with an acetylene torch.

Yes, the Amish won't own a car or have telephones in their house. But they have no compunctions about paying neighbors to drive them to distances, some short, some very long, or borrowing a neighbor's telephone (and paying for long distance charges.)

They sometimes remove electric motors from device such as clothes washers and install gasoline-powered ones. And some farmers had no problem borrowing hay elevators to get hay into their barns. Family gossip says in northern Indiana they often show up on construction job sites and borrow the tools owned by other workers to the point that it's a problem.

It is well known that the elders, or whatever the ruling bodies are called, decide which modern innovations can be accepted. It's sometimes jarring to see children dressed in clothing in a style from the 1800s playing on trampolines. They are not puritans. With their German background, they like their beer and there are pretty reliable reports that one father of a large family also had a girl friend.

Certainly, all people have their foibles. A relative talked about how hundreds of dollars of calls to sex lines appeared on his telephone and it turned out to be from an Amish teenager. After he fessed up, the ladies would call asking "what happened to Jacob?"

Having foibles doesn't mean an entire belief system is compromised or if one man has a mistress that everyone has lax morals. But these settlements are not utopian societies. Those who idealize them for their simple life and values are just as off base as those who find them misfits in a modern world.

They simply have their ways. And they are different and deal with the world in their own way.