Amisher Than Thou

Unfortunately, this blog has inspired a contretemps with one of my younger siblings about whether he, unlike me, is English. In the Amish world, there are two types of people, Amish and English. It does not matter if you're from Africa, Asia or South America, if you're not Amish, then you're English. This sibling, who is 13 years younger than me, was born after my parents left the Amish church.

My younger sibling, who has posted in a comment to an earlier post in this blog as "Amish_Nomad" never lived in a household without the use of electricity or a telephone. He never lived in a household whose sole means of transportation was a horse. He never had a crockhead haircut. He never lived in a household where all of the clothes were hand made. He never had elderly women with big hair say to each other as he and his brother walked by barefooted in their barnyard pants, wearing their wide-brimmed Amish hats, "Oh, aren't they cute?" The possessor of Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees, "Amish_Nomad" now lives in a foreign land working on getting yet another degree. Meanwhile, he thinks that because of his proximity to Amish when he was young and that he now wears a broad-brimmed felt hat, he can call himself an Amish nomad. Bah humbug! Suffering never comes that cheaply.