If you’re like me, you are worried. Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about politics, 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 politicians talk about what should be done to fix this or fix that. I think it is an affliction—this modern, electronic, hyper-sense of doom. 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 Ohio Amish 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, you see.
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 since 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 to 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 Ohio Amish 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 live Amish have ever succeeded.
And that’s the story line in the new novel I am crafting now, the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery. I don’t have a title, yet, and my editors have always proved better at giving a new story it’s title, anyway. I’ll just call it OAM-7 until they tell me what title I should use. In the meantime, I am writing about a thoroughly English fellow from Sarasota, who has decided to give it a try—to become Amish—to try to find the special Amish immunity that seems so alluring in such troubling times as these.
