Related: Witness to the Persecution
Of course, readers know there is only one small group that isn't disparaged in my Glob.
"Living in Unity; Residents in this small Maine town embrace Amish neighbors and their belief in leading a simple life" by Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff | November 29, 2009
UNITY, Maine - As dairy farms in Unity have struggled and died in recent years, town leaders worried the setting would draw developers more interested in erecting neo-Colonials and paving roads than preserving the town’s agricultural heritage. They recruited organic farmers who bought small plots. But vast swaths remained.
Then a little more than a year ago men in banded straw hats and denim suits arrived and started buying big parcels. They built sturdy houses on the hillsides above fields where they planted strawberries and butternut squash, and loosed goats and cows to graze. They started small businesses on their land, turning out metal siding, wind turbines, and furniture, and sold vegetables and baked goods.
“The Amish were the solution that we were looking for - that we could never have dreamed up,’’ said Doug Fox, a neighbor of the Hochstetlers, one of Unity’s eight Amish families.
In a rugged stretch of Maine, where self-reliance and iconoclasm have been long honored, Amish are settling and finding eager neighbors. Amish first made homes in Smyrna and Easton in Aroostook County and most recently in Unity and neighboring Thorndike, in the state’s center, transforming landscapes into scenes that could be postcards from Lancaster, Pa. - byways dotted with pickups giving wide berth to horse-drawn buggies carrying women in bonnets and men with beards. Today, about 200 Amish live in Maine, according to their leaders.
They have come from Michigan and Canada, Tennessee and Kentucky, and other offshoots of original Amish settlements in Pennsylvania. Some are fleeing encroaching suburbs and neck-craning tourists, and seeking open-minded communities that will allow them to practice their brand of ultra-simple living. Some are following a directive to spread the word of their lifestyle and Christian beliefs by starting communities in places far from other Amish settlements.
With their hand-stitched shirts and chaste frocks, the Amish still command double-takes in Maine as they bike to school and carpool to
A GREAT, GREAT IDEA if you can do it, America!!!! GET OFF THAT GRID!!!!
Among some Mainers, there is a small but not insignificant amount of Amish envy....
In Unity, population 1,900, the Amish have found a particularly happy coincidence of interests. The town is home to Unity College, an environmental school that teaches sustainable living practices and lends an earthy quality to the culture. That a group of people with such small carbon footprints - erecting wind turbines to charge battery packs used for powering tools and lanterns, keeping food cold in summer in an insulated basement room lined with three wagonloads of ice chunks from a pond - would land here, strikes many as a perfect alignment....
Oh, this is an AGENDA-PUSHING PIECE!!!
That's why it's a FRONT-PAGE FEATURE!
To be sure, when the Amish first arrived in town last year, they were curiosities, their culture a whispered topic that sent some people scurrying to laptop computers to figure out just what their dress and German-accented English were all about. Residents weren’t sure whether to wave when they saw Amish bicycling along the road, which was now sometimes speckled with manure from horses pulling buggies. Some leery residents asked the town clerk whether they paid property taxes. She assured them they did. But in short order, they became the cool kids that everyone wanted to know....
The *ews must be soooo jealous!
The Amish maintain some divisions. They send their children to their own school and do not permit their children to visit the homes of non-Amish.
I notice when it *ewish segregation and schools it's not a problem.
They are not easily reached because they don’t have phones in their houses....
:-)
Amish discourage phones in homes to preserve family time.
Must be PEACEFUL, too!
They do not read local newspapers or vote in elections. And they often defer to their first language, Pennsylvania Dutch, a German dialect. But Amish have increasingly become a part of town life....
The Amish residents say they had little idea of Unity’s makeup when they settled here. They were looking for land and heard that Unity had ample stock at reasonable prices. (One family bought a 200-acre parcel for $350,000 and another a 100-acre parcel for $235,000, with money principally earned from small businesses.) They say the land needs work to revive its haying potential, but they have been pleasantly surprised by the town’s embrace of their efforts....
The Hochstetler home is a study in efficiency, with solar panels on the roof and two small wind turbines in the field.
Yeah, THAT is why the article even made the paper!
To push their FART-MISTING GLOBAL-WARMING AGENDA!!!
As they tucked into a meal of deer meat and potatoes for lunch on a recent day, their eldest daughter retrieved yogurt from the porch, where food is stored in winter. On the wall, a sign read: “To be content with little is hard, to be content with much is impossible.’’
Still, the house is not without traces of contemporary culture. The baby, Seth, happily bounced in a multicolored plastic ExerSaucer, and when the Hochstetlers hosted the pig roast at their home and neighbors brought bottles of soda and Little Debbie cakes, the Hochstelters did not turn away the offerings.
So what are you trying to say, "reporter?" They have been corrupted?
Only the *ew is never corrupted, huh?
--more--"
Reason Number Three Why No One Reads the Boston Globe Anymore
The Supreme Insult: Jewish Supremacism Is Not Racism
