Are Mennonites at Risk for Drone Attacks?

courtesy Infowars.com

Cautioning the reader that the purpose of this blog is neither news, apologetic, advocacy or commentary, but merely attempting to feel out the context of the Postmodern Mennonite experience, I am communicating my discomfit with the new Obama Doctrine (his use of drones, period, let alone to kill American citizens).  I am neither criticizing Obama nor the policy – I am just not sure how to process it.

   

Enn Je’foa rode

              

 

    I will come clean on the fact that while I have a degree in international affairs, I have been long out of the field and only occasionally avail myself of pertinent literature, however, Amy Davidson in Whom Can the President Kill? From the 06 Feb 2013 New Yorker Magazine, has helped organize some uneasy questions that had been forming in my mind.  My ethnic Mennonite heritage acts as a second lens to bring these concerns into focus.  This is my best attempt to communicate these thoughts.

a)  In considering the matter of illegal Mennonite immigration into Bolivia from Mexico and Chaco, I am compelled by the possibility that there remains within the Mennonite weltanschauung or cultural self-consciousness, a deep-seated alienation from modern concepts of citizenship and the nation state.  Obviously, I have long argued that we are a distinctive, unique, and yet cohesive ethnic group – but to what extent does this constitute a stateless ethnic identity or an anti-state identity.  To the extent that we are anti-statial (see note), is this an unconscious ethnically engrained protest against the modernist state?  Are there any theological or cultural ramifications?

A Tale of Two Schools

Public Memorials at Sandy Hook Elementary

    Americans are still struggling to come to grips with the recent massacre of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.  Nationally, the mood has gone from one of shock and mourning to one of blame and politics – a game that possibly threatens to injure even more innocents by depriving children with potential mental health issues and struggles from realizing full and equal civil rights and lifestyles commiserate with those of their peers.  This is a dangerous game.  Despite the confident advertising of the pharmaceutical psycho-therapeutical commercial industry, we really do not seem to understand very much at all about the inter-connectivity between personality, action and psychological states of mind.  In fact, we seem uncomfortably unable to answer basic questions as to what “normal” is, let alone how to define, treat and legislate the abnormal.  

    The world of psychological and emotional disorders is too complicated for untrained lawmakers, or even worse, lawyers, to try to fix in their well-meaning, amateurish, headline-grabbing sort of way.  Persons with real needs and disabilities might easily find themselves caught between hardline conservative Tea Party gun-slingers desperate to avert the disaster of gun control and the good intentions of the liberal left (often with an eye towards their own professional pocketbooks).  Blaming events such as Sandy Hook on the mentally ill not only conveniently deflects criticism and legislation aimed at non-sporting gun owners and sociologically suspect separatists, but seems to buttress age-old political slogans stating that guns don’t kill people, it is the “mentally ill” person behind the gun that kills people.

    On the other side, you have a juggernaut of compassionate, caring, professional liberals split between well-intentioned if too often ineffective efforts to aid and assist the mentally ill and disabled and the promise of increased budgets and funding into their programs, clinics and practices.  The decision to blame the mentally ill for social disasters is a dangerous path that must be trod most gingerly and with a humility that is not yet present in the debate.