Sunday, November 18, 2012

NYC Educator: The Amish Are Wimps

NYC Educator: The Amish Are Wimps:


The Amish Are Wimps

For years, I've been hearing about those hearty souls, up with the sun, and asleep with the moon, using only a candle now and then to make their way in the evening. And no they don't have electricity, so they aren't frittering away their time with Facebook and Twitter, and certainly they aren't indulging in anything so inane as a blog. So we'll grant them that.

But in my house, we don't have any stinking electricity either. Now here's where the Amish lose me. In their homes, they have to have walls, and floors and all sorts of other frivolities. None of that for us. We've taken down our walls, because we aren't going to bother with any of that nonsense anymore. And pretty soon we're gonna get rid of those floors too, probably tomorrow.

Because this is America, land of the free and home of the brave. In America, we don't have to depend on walls, and floors and electricity. We aren't one of those wimpy socialist European countries where everyone simply gets health care just for being alive. No, we make sure that the people who need money the very least get tax breaks, because they're so fragile that if you touched them, they'd probably break.

The rest of us are a bunch of cowboys wandering the plains in our gas-guzzling automobiles, surveying the landscape, taking that goshdarn suburban outlook and moving it back to the piles of rubble that suit our post-Sandy apocalyptic sensibilities. Because that picture to the left? That's the real America.