Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

millennial hope S 179
with fewer highways and more bike trails, fewer malls and better
schools, less television and more parks, fewer smokestacks and
more windmills, fewer gangs and more attentive parents, fewer jobs
outsourced to inhuman sweat shops overseas and more permanent,
well-paying, green jobs in the local economy. That would, indeed,
be not nirvana but a “kinder and gentler society,” and that leads to
the fourth transition.
On October 2, 2006, a lone gunman entered an Amish schoolhouse
near the village of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and opened
fi re, killing fi ve girls and severely wounding fi ve others. In the
aftermath, what was surprising was not that yet another wellarmed
gunman had snapped and gone on a killing spree, but rather
the Amish response. Instead of anger, recrimination, and lawsuits,
within hours of the shootings the Amish reached out to the killer’s
family, offering forgiveness, mercy, and help (Kraybill, Nolt, and
Weaver-Zercher, 2007, p. 43). Instead of hatred and revenge, the
response was to offer the killer’s widow and children friendship
and support. At one open-casket funeral, the grandfather of one of
the victims admonished the younger children not to “think evil of
the man who did this” (p. 45). At the killer’s funeral, “About thirtyfi
ve or forty Amish came to the burial. They shook [the family’s]
hands and cried. They embraced Amy [the killer’s widow] and the
children. There were no grudges, no hard feelings, only forgiveness”
(p. 46). The acts of forgiveness were “neither calculated nor
random,” but rather “emerged from who they were long before”
(p. xii). The Amish take the admonition to avoid violence and
forgive their transgressors seriously. Amish forgiveness, nonetheless,
raises many perplexing questions. Should we forgive those
who in cold blood harm others? Should forgiveness extend to
those who commit particularly heinous crimes? Should forgiveness
extend to persons who show no remorse for their actions?
Should Simon Wiesenthal (1997) have forgiven the young, dying
Nazi storm trooper who begged for his forgiveness? To raise such
questions is to go into a realm in which reason doesn’t help much.