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Wearing Black Because You Have To

Imagine a small nowhere town like you've seen in movies.

There's about 30 to 80 people who live there and they all know what each other looks like, where each lives, and what each does. If you live in that town, everyone knows who you are. Anywhere you are in town you will be in contact with someone, so everyone knows where you are and when. And they know how you should be. If you want to change or just experiment with who you are, everyone will know. You can't just test it out. It will be part of who you are perceived to be from now on. It's a small town.

Now imagine a kid. A kid is going to be more experimental because like it or not he's changing every day as his physical and mental abilities grow. So a kid will sometimes step too far and do unusual things. You can only count on his parents to not let him get too weird and become a burden to have in society. But someone's parents were negligent and allowed the kid to mail away to some big city and order a computer. And he attached it to the phoneline, which had before just been a trusty way for us to be together here, and now he's looking at all this stuff from these big cities. And let's face it there's some pretty weird people in those cities and all the smut and junk will corrupt him. Never mind the trash they have in that "public" library. Left wing government plot, that is. Why do people ever allow those bastards in? Just tears the moral fibre right out of a country.

...

By now you're smiling at this caricature of a small town mind.

Okay. Now what if the kid is a Mennonite? Why is it somehow cool to let it happen then?

Because they're somehow of a more pure and holy life? So they're zoo animals holding the last strains of a cultural genealogical treasure? So that boy is not one of us anymore and must be allowed isolation from knowledge we grant ourselves the freedom to have?

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