Lazy eye

Jack Straw, former Foreign Secretary, has caused a bit of a kerfuffle back in Blighty by mentioning the veil that some extreme Muslim women wear. I have put it like that because I think this is what happens. I think there are people who read odd words in something and construct whatever fits in with their current world view.
Martin Kettle, a Guardian journo, has written an incredibly insightful piece on this, in an attempt to direct people back to what Jack Straw actually and very carefully said.

And of course this echoes for me the recent furore over the Pope's perfectly well thought-out and expressed comments, many didn't bother to read what he said, just jumped.

There's a reason why I am dredging up old news. It's because I want to make this statement.
I think the Amish are weird. I seriously do. I also think Mennonites are weird and Jehovah's Witnesses. But then I met and worked with and became friends with a Witness and I realised that he wasn't weird, his family weren't either, they were all just perfectly normal people. Yes, I'm aware that I'm using contentious words like 'weird' and 'normal'.
I also know and am good friends with someone who was brought up as a Mennonite and she is an amazing person. Weird, sure, but then in the good weird way that I cherish.

Ok, but obviously you're not allowed to say anything negative whatsoever about the Amish right now because of the great tragedy that has befallen one of their communities.

In Britain, when I lived in Woking, near London, we had a community of Plymouth Brethren. The girls - and note only the girls - had to wear headscarves. The women wore old-fashioned clothes and the Brethren weren't allowed to watch TV, so if a lesson was going to include any TV viewing, out went the kids. But even so, they weren't as separatist as the Amish.

In general, communities like the Amish can live their lives in the US. I don't know whether they get heckled when they go into town or what happens, but I imagine that they are fair game, and that seems par for the course when you have made a decision to live apart from the rest of society.
In a way, they are able to live the way they wish because the rest of us don't. We couldn't all live this way because there is something in the human spirit which drives us to create, to seek, to develop, to research and we will risk even our lives to do so. That's why we are where we are today, for good or bad.

But out of this horrible mess come stories that reach in and touch the most sensitive part of our soul.

It still seems unclear why Charles Roberts killed these particular girls. All that surrounds him sounds like one single moment of screaming for help. He lived and loved and never said boo to a goose. There weren't the usual keynote mysterious squirrel killings to foreshadow his act. There is the possibility that he had abused two members of his family when he was twelve, but at time of writing this has not been confirmed.
But he did plan his final, defining actions. He loathed himself so he had to go out making sure the world too hated him.

The Amish community, we are told, does not subscribe to commercial Health Insurance schemes, so help is being given by others. How many questions does that raise? But whilst others are giving to pay for the care of the Amish injured, their elders are asking that the wife and family of the killer should not be forgotten. They too are now without a husband and father.

And the story that emerges from the schoolroom where the little girls were shot is that the older girls begged that they should be shot first so that the younger ones might not have to die. Could that ever happen in an ordinary classroom in Britain, America, Canada?

There are a million reasons why the Amish couldn't continue to exist if the rest of us weren't prepared to carry on as usual, there are many other places where their existence simply wouldn't be tolerated full stop. But they do exist and they do exist because the West prizes above all else the freedom to choose our own lifestyle so long as it doesn't harm others.
But from this strange little tableau, this opposite of nativity, if we look carefully, if we read our text between the lines instead of in terms of only the words which hit us in the eye, there are shining truths to behold.