#hate them!!

I was raised culturally Mennonite. My parents left the church when I was tiny, and I was pretty specifcally raised nonreligious. But I'm gonna say a household in which my brother wasn't allowed to play games with guns in them and anger is always a weakness is culturally Mennonite, whether or not my parents knew it. I absorbed a lot of that culture. I absorbed a lot of those values. A community living by Mennonite values packs up and leaves an entire country when mandatory military service is introduced. A family living by Mennonite values is one where my cousin's now-husband, a gentle, always-interested introvert from Israel, was side-eyed for owning the gun he'd been given in his mandatory military service.

What I'm saying is, Mennonites are hardline against anything snacking of violence. It's a cultural and a moral imperative to avoid everything that could potentially support violence. It's a laudable but at times unhealthy obsession, sometimes bordering on illogical. It's a set of values I absorbed pretty indelibly as a child and it goes deeply against the grain even to hear Boyfriend playing PvP war games online. The response is emotional as much as moral.