The Amish Have Immunity

If you’re like me, you are worried.  Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about elections, and we are worried about global conflict.  It’s an almost irresistible sense of worry that draws us to the news reports each day to learn what the latest crisis has been.  Or to learn what has become of our retirement accounts.  Or to listen to the candidate’s debate, to try to decided who should be our next president.  I think it is an affliction – this modern, electronic, hyper-intense spectacle that has invaded our culture.  And I often wish I were immune to it.  Like the Amish are.

For the most part, the Amish people of Holmes County, Ohio, where I have set my Amish-Country Mysteries, don’t have retirement accounts.  They mostly don’t even have any money in the banks.  They aren’t paying interest on a credit card, and they don’t ever worry about the Stock Market.  They are immune.

The Amish people of Holmes County don’t vote for President, so they are not caught up in the frenzy of national politics.  In fact, they don’t vote for any office that has control over life and death, because they do not believe in killing of any kind.  So, because the president has the authority to make war, they don’t vote for president.  They don’t vote for sheriff, either, or for anyone who might carry a gun.  They are pacifists of the first order, and they will not participate in any aspect of killing, not even to vote.  So they are immune, you see, from the political frenzy that grips so many of us English.

Amish people also do not worry about global conflict.  They are fatalists for the most part, much like the dwarf Enos Erb, a character in my sixth Amish-Country Mystery, Separate from the World, where I examined the near-Zen nature of their devotion to God’s will in their lives.  Global conflict?  Why worry?  It is in God’s hands.

So, the Amish have immunity.  They live separate from the world, and they are immune to troubles like finances, politics, and war.  That sounds pretty good, I think.  You’d almost think that living Amish might be better.  But the conversion is nearly impossible.  Few of the English who have tried to become Amish have ever succeeded. 

And that’s the story line in the seventh Amish-Country Mystery, Harmless as Doves.  It is a story about a thoroughly English fellow who has decided to give it a try – to become Amish – to try to find that Amish brand of immunity, which these days seems so alluring to those of us caught up in the spectacle of the modern world.