Word: amish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rabbit hole of protective isolation and mauled to death if they emerge. And be honest: Do they deserve any better? Maybe not. But maybe society as a whole does. The nation teetered between sorrow and rage last week after Charles Roberts, a 32-year-old milkman in Pennsylvania's Amish country, committed his incomprehensible murders of five girls in a one-room schoolhouse, before turning his gun on himself. The fury over Roberts' savagery was made worse when he told his wife by cell phone shortly before the killings that he had molested two toddler relatives, both of them girls...
...question is, Could he really have stepped forward? Would anyone with even the faintest pedophiliac stirrings dare? The blunt instrument with which the culture defines pedophilia and the utterly unforgiving way with which we react to it may simply make it impossible. In the same week in which the Amish were burying their dead, Robert Fontanez, a 27-year-old Delaware man, received a sentence of five years for negligent homicide as punishment for beating a 77-year-old neighbor to death after his five-year old daughter accused the man of touching her inappropriately. A medical exam...
...Several Amish officials were invited to participate after their peaceful people were victimized last week by the highest-profile school shooting since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. They elected not to participate because they stay out of public affairs, an Administration official said. Other recent school shootings terrorized pupils in Wisconsin and Colorado. On Monday, as officials were making final preparations for the conference, a 13-year-old in a trench coat shot an assault rifle into the ceiling of his Missouri middle school...
...assault on our children: that's a consensus builder if ever there was one. Dateline's targets deserve to be put away, and programs like it do a service by alerting parents to threats. And last week, which also saw the schoolhouse murders of five Amish girls by a stranger who evidently planned to rape his victims, the media could be forgiven its wall-to-wall weirdo watch. The problem is proportion. Strangers make up 7% of child molesters; the vast majority are family members. But you wouldn't know it from watching TV. When stranger predators are everywhere...
Nickel Mines, Pa., is not just a small, rural town where bad things rarely happen. It is a place, steeped in Amish culture, where peacefulness and spiritualism are nurtured. When big-city dwellers daydream of somewhere far from the high-intensity stresses - and perceived dangers - of the megapolis, it might be a place like Nickel Mines that comes to mind. Surely that's one of the reasons that America was so shaken this week, when five children were executed in Nickel Mines' one-room schoolhouse...