Mennonites with Guns

Mennonites with Guns

I was really torn while in grade 10 when for some mysterious reason all male students at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, where I attended high school were required to join the army cadets. Was this some “Brave New World, or 1984 Orwellian future unfolding on my campus.  I suppose the year being 1967 and our American neighbours were immersed in a useless war of attrition with the Viet Kong, and  well knowing that if that little island of “democracy” born of European imperialism fell to communism then inevitably and without fail, like a row of unstable dominos, all of Asia would follow suit and before we knew it McCarthy would be vindicated and there we would be in an impossible uncompromising situation faced with China, North Korea, Vietnam and the rest of Asia with socialized medicine and universal health care like we have in Canada today. 

Back then America and, we her quasi allies, were not about to let that happen.  The best bastion to protect the free world of the horrors of red communism and creeping socialism while still making the world save for global conglomerate investment in the future was to have Canadian students do mandatory military cadet service while still in high school, or so thought our provincial government authorities at the time.  The mere deterent effect alone of all that raw manpower could easily sway the balance of power in our favour and bring back “our boys” before Christmas.  It was a game worth risking, but why me?

In addition to the Hot War in Asia the Cold War was also raging.  During many evenings I recall,  sitting with my parents, lacking any sort of meaningful social life at the time, in front of the black and white RCA Victor TV console with our range of 12 channels intently listening to the calm, modulated, masculine voice of reason and all things sane, Walter Cronkite and others giving us the casualty lists from Vietnam.  At the time those reports somehow sounded like morbid sports scores.  “Today after heavy fighting in simultaneous engagements in the northern highlands and the southern Mekong Delta, American Forces officially report 35 casualties 9 missing in action, and 12 wounded, while the Viet Kong suffered 379 dead and 633 wounded.”  Those figures would appear automagically on the TV screen as the words were spoken, a technical marvel at the time.  I took solace in those numbers thinking, like a game, we were winning and by winning we were safe and the war was on the other side of the sky and would never touch us.  Even so there was enough paranoia to go around, but all the while quiet little Waterloo and my sheltered sequestered little Mennonite world seemed as safe as Obie in Sherriff of Mayberry, USA, without the draft, until, of course, I got word of the army cadets at my school. 

The odd thing for me about being a Mennonite and therefore a pacifist was my apparent love of guns. This caused much cognitive disodence for me, a term I did not fully understand at the time.  Then I was just a pimply faced confused kid who, who like most guys at the time and now, liked to shoot things; but sadly I belonged to a religion that felt shooting things did not represent the correct moral direction.  Was I wrong in my adolescent desire to want to shoot squirrels, small song birds, amphibians and ground hogs, or was this some sign of deep emotional and moral decay that would later arise in the form of some sort of psychotic break later in life as I became the first Mennonite serial killer.  I pondered these deep thoughts alone in my bedroom late at night as I lovingly polished my 22 rifle which I hid in the crawl space of my parent’s house.  When in such quandaries I often asked myself the question, “What would Menno do?”

Just to clarify, because I just reread that last paragraph and you might be getting the wrong idea.  It fact it was creeping me out a little bit.  It wasn’t just me all right.  If other people do a thing that makes it better, my friends also had weapons.  Hell, it was the sixties, peace, love, hippies, sleep ins, marches, demonstrations, protests, Yoko Ono, “Are you going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair?”  Ours was just a little sub group who happened to like all of the above and we just happened to be heavily armed in a very benign way, not in the spirit of Malcolm X.  I’m still not saying this quite right.  Let me lead by example.

Maybe first I should come clean and tell you about our little arsenal of weapons.  Although we started out with bee bee guns, pellet rifles and alley guns we had quickly graduated to having  two 22 rifles, a 12 guage shot gun, a ten guage shot gun, a 22 hand gun (that was a coup)and a a cross bow made with a car spring that could send an arrow six inches into the base of a willow tree.  Mind you that is very soft wood, but I would hate to see what that would do to a ground hog, but I digress.

Times were less complex then and no one at all thought it odd that we, as kids, would not have access to weaponry. After all wasn’t that right somehow enshrined in our constitution somewhere? The right to bear arms and speak French, throw tea into the Quebec harbor.  It was all a function of our history and traditions, or am I confusing these rights and events with some other country? A moot point.

Our friends were similarily armed, but I suppose the significant thing here is that they were not Mennonite friends.  To this day I am not sure if my other Mennonite friends were actually armed and had a cache of weapons like my brother and I did. But to maintain a balance to the discussion keep two other points in mind:  we had two sets of friends Mennonite and Non-Mennonite and second and maybe most importantly to my ever lasting soul, I was the younger brother and therefore was less culpable in all of this if you the reader should turn against me as the chapter progresses.

Let me clarify this confusion through the use of a clever analogy. It was necessary to have two sets of friends just as a husband in some societies has a wife and a lover, now I’m not saying that about Mennonite society, somehow I can’t imagine a Mennonite mistress, but I guess anything is possible, this is just an analogy to make my point.  The “wife” in my comparison you see serves to present the values society respects and accepts, while the lover represents the values that remain hidden, along with the hypocracy.  My Mennonite friends were my “wife” and my secular school friends, the English, were my “lovers”.  Oh, mien got in himmel this explanation is still not right, now I’m sounding more like not am I only potentially dangerous, I am also sexually perverted on many levels. 

On a typical hot and humid July day my brother and our non-church friends could be found in convoy with small arsenal of pellet guns, 22 rifles and food supplies for the day’s journey riding past lock number 1 of the Welland ship canal.  The joy at lock one was the design of the bride with its 20ton semi circular cement counter balance.  Here we would take great joy in placing our pennies brought expressly for this purpose along the track followed by the counter balance as the bridge either raised or lowered.  It was our educated group opinion that this bridge did a far superior job in squashing pennies than did any CNR or CPR train ever could. In fact it was almost like comparing a real money to counterfeit. When showing off my inventory of flattened pennies I would always take great pride in pointing out that the flattest of the flat were lock one originals in mint condition, or there abouts.

Past lock one we eventually crossed the bridge and continued along the the same paved road where Art Reeces sister was killed by a drunk driver while riding her bicycle last Fall.  Art wasn’t with us on this road trip but we would always make a point of stopping at the spot we determined to be the exact spot of her death and take a moment of silence.  None of us really new Alice, as she was several years older, but Art was our friend and we thought we at least owed him that amount of respect and sensitivity for his loss. We felt oddly that we were special, for at our tender ages, actually knowing someone who had died.  Fifty years later when I drove this same road by car because of time the distances seem compressed.  I still know where to slow down, just before the rise in the hill.  I still remember where Alice died. 

After the Canal we pass the turn off to Avondale Dairy, where on special Sunday afternoons our parents take us for ice cream.  We are all tempted to turn off an abandon our quest for the greater good of ice cream, but we save that for another day and toil on out along the two lane highway, when not accompanied by parents to what seemed like the edge of the known world.  Our ultimate destination was McNab School where my brother actually attended classes in grade eight.  The local school board had reopened and renovated this historic school house because of the explosion of baby boomers flooding through the elementary school system and heading toward the still unprepared high school system and Canadian society in general.

A winding creek flowed below the play yard and this is where we liked to hike, make camp and go hunting for wild game.  To clarify it was basically open season on any type of bird, rodent, ground hog, rabbit, barn cat, bat, large insect, snake, or turtle we could find.  We had a very  broad scope of interest and understanding of nature.  He had not yet heard of ecology.  

To be continued...