Amish living.....

[BirdDog]

Some discussion about Amish living here in other threads. Trust me, no fun if you ask me. Yes, nostalgia is great but the real thing is different. We lived off-grid for 12+ years and truth is, it sucked! Compost toilets are the pits.

I respect them totally but no way I'd want to live my entire life that way. There is a reason we went to electricity and indoor plumbing. Nice to have 21st century things like a toilet that flushes, running water and electricity.

[GabeU]

I, too, respect them, and am in admiration of their very hard working, close family oriented ethics and simple lives, but there is no way in the world that I would EVER want to live like they do.  I am envious, though, of that simple life.    

I'm far too reliant on the creature comforts of the world I grew up in. 

[BirdDog]

Wife and I are still pretty simple even with modern luxuries. We stay at home with no close neighbors on 20 acres surrounded by national forest on three sides.

Go into town maybe twice a week for groceries. We're pretty much loners when it comes down to it. Our 3 dogs are our family, we love them like children actually.

May sound pathetic but we are happy, especially now that we no longer live off-grid and have real plumbing and electricity.

The Amish can have the no indoor plumbing and no electricity. May be a simple life but there is a reason most don't embrace it. It is 200 years ago. Could also go back to the ancient Roman way of living. They were actually pretty advanced for the time. (Plumbing)

I respect them living the way they want, just not the way I, or my wife, want to live in modern days. Feel lucky we were born in modern times with modern conveniences.

[maratsade]

Isn't all of this (the desire for a simple way of life) a romantic view, though?  The realities of such a life are probably quite harsh and society as a whole seems to want to get as far from that as possible:  no indoor plumbing, having to go crack ice at 4 am to get water, having to go fetch wood, having to feed the animals, plant the fields, harvest the fields (unless some blight has been visited upon the fields and now there will be little to no food for the winter), etc.   Can we not live in simpler ways within our comfort? 

[MarkJFine]

It is somewhat romantic, and we all might be in better shape...

But things progressed to where they are for a reason, imo.

Claire was able to treat the typhoid victims in the 1840's because she was innoculated in the 1940s. [for those that watch Outlander].

[GabeU]

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@MarkJFine wrote:

Claire was able to treat the typhoid victims in the 1840's because she was innoculated in the 1940s. [for those that watch Outlander].

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That's a good show.  I don't follow it regularly, but I have seen a few episodes, especially this season.  

Not to put the Amish down in any way, as it's their way of life and not mine, but during the time my mother was providing medical care to them I know of at least two men that had very treatable illnesses that ended up dying because of their beliefs.  Rather than trusting more involved modern medicine they relied on herbs, and, unfortunately, a terrible scam involving bottles of "blessed" water that cost them $30 each and which they were supposed to drink every day.  Not the Peter Popoff "blessed water" scam, but very similar.   

No personal info was divulged to me by my mother, of course, and I was only told about it after the fact.   

It was VERY sad, as both were still fairly young, and both had a wife and children (as do just about all Amish men).  The families rally around the wives and children, but still.  😞    

[maratsade]

That's really very sad, @GabeU.  I would imagine it happens fairly often.

[GabeU]

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@maratsade wrote:

That's really very sad, @GabeU.  I would imagine it happens fairly often.

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It is, and it does, unfortunately, happen much more often than it should.  Luckily, the aversion to modern medicine, or at least more invasive modern medicine, kind of varies from family to family, as there have been others in similar situations who DID seek professional treatment.  

The hardest thing to deal with this the fact that you can't convince them otherwise.  In the situations I mentioned my mother tried to convince them that they truly needed professional treatment, but you can only say so much before you begin to offend their beliefs, and she definitely didn't want to do that.  It's kind of one of those situations where you know the proverbial train wreck is coming, but you can't convince them to not park their buggy on the tracks.  😞   

[maratsade]

@GabeU, It's definitely an ethical dilemma -- you want to help, but how much do you actually intrude?  They have beliefs, and intruding too much would attack those beliefs, and then you would be out of their sphere and unable to help at all.  I don't envy the position your mother was in.

[GabeU]

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@maratsade wrote:

@GabeU, It's definitely an ethical dilemma -- you want to help, but how much do you actually intrude?  They have beliefs, and intruding too much would attack those beliefs, and then you would be out of their sphere and unable to help at all.  I don't envy the position your mother was in. 

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Exactly.  You want to convince them to save their lives, but you can only say so much so as to not, for lack of a better term, scare everyone off.  I didn't envy her position, either, that's for darn sure.  😞  

[maratsade]

I hope that overall, the balance was positive, with more people helped than lost.  I  imagine she made a big difference on many lives.

[MarkJFine]

It really is a difficult thing. You know there are way they can be helped, but you also have to respect their decision to reject those remedies on principle.

What I find is more unfortunate, and somewhat objectionable, is that others that don't follow their ways also reject modern methods because they've been huckstered into it.

Raises real ethics questions of whose decision should be respected, and whose are downright criminal.

[maratsade]

Do you mean new agers, @MarkJFine?  I know a few of those, and their approaches to health can be quite baffling.

[MarkJFine]

new agers, anti-vaccers... not sure what you want to call them. Think it's funny how they'll not trust modern medicine because they think its to prepare them for the alien oil from the X-Files, but they'll feed their kids a steady diet of cheap fast junk food filled with genetically modified who knows what... then wonder why there's a high incidence of autism. It's all backwards.

[GabeU]

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@MarkJFine wrote:

new agers, anti-vaccers... not sure what you want to call them. Think it's funny how they'll not trust modern medicine because they think its to prepare them for the alien oil from the X-Files, but they'll feed their kids a steady diet of cheap fast junk food filled with genetically modified who knows what... then wonder why there's a high incidence of autism. It's all backwards.

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Ditto on that!  

[maratsade]

Well, there are a lot of new agers and anti-vaxxers who are consistent with their behaviour across the board: no vaccines, but also no GMO, for example. I find it all a bit perplexing.

You can't blame them, though, right? That black oil that the X Files warned humanity about is kinda creepy. 

[MarkJFine]

Lol... Point being that there are a tremendous amount of people that will put an insurmountable amount of faith in science fiction and conspiracy theories to the point where it becomes a clear and present danger to society.

It never really bothered me, nor did I really think about it until my wife, who is a teacher in a school that requires each student to be properly immunized (but really looks the other way) became immuno-suppressed from a procedure a year ago. She's also been sick a few times (hospitalized twice) because parents knowingly send their kids to school sick rather than keep them at home, where they belong.

The combination of all these things, not to mention a CDC that won't even bother to deal with real issues for the next 4 years, will eventually be disasterous.

[maratsade]

"Point being that there are a tremendous amount of people that will put an insurmountable amount of faith in science fiction and conspiracy theories to the point where it becomes a clear and present danger to society."

I did get the point; I was just joking. 🙂

I agree it's a serious issue, and looking the other way will backfire.

[MarkJFine]

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@maratsade wrote:
I did get the point; I was just joking. 🙂

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Oh, I know...

[macsociety]

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@BirdDog wrote:

Some discussion about Amish living here in other threads. Trust me, no fun if you ask me. Yes, nostalgia is great but the real thing is different. We lived off-grid for 12+ years and truth is, it sucked! Compost toilets are the pits.

I respect them totally but no way I'd want to live my entire life that way. There is a reason we went to electricity and indoor plumbing. Nice to have 21st century things like a toilet that flushes, running water and electricity.

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Like anything, there is more to Amish, so there are old order that are like what you explain, new order, and many various sects of it.  Some own and use cars, have modern plumbing, etc....  Then there are other anabaptist groups that are similar to the amish but different, and again, many sects with different levels of modernity. Various Brethren and German Baptist groups all fall in similar groups.

For me, I would love to give up some of the modern things that consume my life, but at the same time it is how I earn a living, so makes it hard to do so.  But I can still dream.

TJ

[MarkJFine]

I PCS'd to Virginia from the NYC metro area in 1987, when high technology was an IBM PC AT and dialup modems to non-networked bulletin boards.

I moved to an area where I could leave my doors unlocked if I wanted to. Coming from an apartment in South Amboy that was broken into three times in as many years, it was a much welcome change.

The problem for me is: Back then, "cable was coming", and cell phones / internet wasn't even invented yet. ARPAnet existed and saw prototypes tho, just wasn't available to the public. Well... 30 years later and there's still no cable (DTV and Dish are only options), I barely get 2 bars of LTE at home, and you all know where my internet comes from.

It was cute back then, but I kinda feel like I live OCONUS, on an island (old joke, but even they have better tech than this now).